under a Creative Commons License. Ocean Science Interannual-to-decadal variability of North Atlantic air-sea CO2

Abstract. The magnitude of the interannual variability of North Atlantic air-sea CO2 fluxes remains uncertain. Interannual extremes simulated by atmospheric inverse approaches are typically about ±0.3 Pg C yr−1, whereas those from ocean models are less than ±0.1 Pg C yr−1. Thus variability in the No...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: S. Raynaud, J. C. Orr, O. Aumont, K. B. Rodgers, P. Yiou
Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
Format: Text
Language:English
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Online Access:http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.391.3669
http://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/docs/00/33/11/39/PDF/os-2-43-2006.pdf
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Summary:Abstract. The magnitude of the interannual variability of North Atlantic air-sea CO2 fluxes remains uncertain. Interannual extremes simulated by atmospheric inverse approaches are typically about ±0.3 Pg C yr−1, whereas those from ocean models are less than ±0.1 Pg C yr−1. Thus variability in the North Atlantic is either about 60 % or less than 20 % of the global variability of about ±0.5 Pg C yr−1 (as estimated by both approaches). Here we explore spatiotemporal variability within the North Atlantic basin of one ocean model in order to more fully describe potential counteracting trends in different regions that may explain why basin-wide variability is small relative to global-scale variability. Typical atmospheric inverse approaches separate the North Atlantic into at most a few regions and thus cannot properly simulate such counteracting effects. For this study, two simulations