Controls on open-ocean North Atlantic ΔpCO 2 at seasonal and interannual time scales are different
The North Atlantic is a substantial sink for anthropogenic CO 2 . Understanding the mechanisms driving the sink's variability is key to assessing its current state and predicting its potential response to global climate change. Here we apply a time series decomposition technique to satellite an...
| Published in: | Geophysical Research Letters |
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| Main Authors: | , , , , , |
| Format: | Article in Journal/Newspaper |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
2018
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://eprints.soton.ac.uk/423550/ https://eprints.soton.ac.uk/423550/1/Henson_et_al_2018_Geophysical_Research_Letters.pdf |
| Summary: | The North Atlantic is a substantial sink for anthropogenic CO 2 . Understanding the mechanisms driving the sink's variability is key to assessing its current state and predicting its potential response to global climate change. Here we apply a time series decomposition technique to satellite and in situ data to examine separately the factors (both biological and nonbiological) that affect the sea-air CO 2 difference (ΔpCO 2 ) on seasonal and interannual time scales. We demonstrate that on seasonal time scales, the subpolar North Atlantic ΔpCO 2 signal is predominantly correlated with biological processes, whereas seawater temperature dominates in the subtropics. However, the same factors do not necessarily control ΔpCO 2 on interannual time scales. Our results imply that the mechanisms driving seasonal variability in ΔpCO 2 cannot necessarily be extrapolated to predict how ΔpCO 2 , and thus the North Atlantic CO 2 sink, may respond to increases in anthropogenic CO 2 over longer time scales. |
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