Accurate monitoring of the North Atlantic air-sea CO2 flux from a network of voluntary observing ships

• Main Authors: Watson, Andrew J., Schuster, Ute, Telszewski, Maciej, Johannessen, Truls, Olsen, Are, Omar, Abdirahman, Pfeil, Benjamin, Koertzinger, A., Steinhoff, Tobias, Wallace, D. W. R., Olafsson, Jon, Corbière, A., Metzl, Nicolas, Lefèvre, Nathalie, Ríos, Aida F., Pérez, Fiz F., Padín, X. A., Bates, Nicholas R., Wanninkhof, Rik, Gonzales-Davila, M., Santana-Casiano, J. M.
• Format: Conference Object
• Language: English
• Published: 2008
• Subjects: North Atlantic
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10261/330502

Ocean Sciences Meeting, March 2-7, 2008, Orlando, Florida Since the start of 2005 under the EU’s Carbo-Ocean project, we have participated in co-ordinated observations of sea surface pCO2 and related variables from a network of commercial vessels in the North Atlantic. Typically five vessels are operating at any one time. The observations can be used to reconstruct the sea-surface pCO2 field, and thence estimate air-sea fluxes, with unprecedented resolution and accuracy. Using the observations for the calendar year 2005, we use a variety of geostatistical methods to derive the precision with which regional fluxes can be obtained. The observations are generalized to the entire N Atlantic from 10N to 65N by exploiting relations between surface pCO2, SST and mixed layer depth. Using semi-variograms or an empirical technique of selective data deletion applied to the residuals, we obtain a 1-sigma uncertainty of 6% on the annual flux into the region as a whole. This is very much more precise than has been possible for any comparable region of the world (land or ocean) up to now No