Update on the temperature corrections of global air-sea CO2 flux estimates

Dong, Yuanxu ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1468-1623, Bakker, Dorothee C. E. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9234-5337, Bell, Thomas G., Huang, Boyin, Landschützer, Peter, Liss, Peter S. and Yang, Mingxi (2022) Update on the temperature corrections of global air-sea CO2 flux estimates. Global Biogeochemical Cycles, 36 (9). ISSN 0886-6236

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Abstract

The oceans are a major carbon sink. Sea surface temperature (SST) is a crucial variable in the calculation of the air-sea carbon dioxide (CO2) flux from surface observations. Any bias in the SST or any upper ocean vertical temperature gradient (e.g., the cool skin effect) potentially generates a bias in the CO2 flux estimates. A recent study suggested a substantial increase (∼50% or ∼0.9 Pg C yr−1) in the global ocean CO2 uptake due to this temperature effect. Here, we use a gold standard buoy SST data set as the reference to assess the accuracy of insitu SST used for flux calculation. A physical model is then used to estimate the cool skin effect, which varies with latitude. The bias-corrected SST (assessed by buoy SST) coupled with the physics-based cool skin correction increases the average ocean CO2 uptake by ∼35% (0.6 Pg C yr−1) from 1982 to 2020, which is substantially smaller than the previous correction. After these temperature considerations, we estimate an average net ocean CO2 uptake of 2.2 ± 0.4 Pg C yr−1 from 1994 to 2007 based on an ensemble of surface observation-based flux estimates, in line with the independent interior ocean carbon storage estimate corrected for the river induced natural outgassing flux (2.1 ± 0.4 Pg C yr−1).

Item Type:	Article
Faculty \ School:	Faculty of Science > School of Environmental Sciences University of East Anglia Research Groups/Centres > Theme - ClimateUEA
UEA Research Groups:	Faculty of Science > Research Groups > Centre for Ocean and Atmospheric Sciences Faculty of Science > Research Groups > Climatic Research Unit
Related URLs:	https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1...
Depositing User:	LivePure Connector
Date Deposited:	21 Oct 2022 11:32
Last Modified:	04 Aug 2023 00:52
URI:	https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/89260
DOI:	10.1029/2022GB007360

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