ALBERT

Description: Carbon dioxide (CO2) is, next to water vapour, considered to be the most important natural greenhouse gas on Earth. Rapidly rising atmospheric CO2 concentrations caused by human actions such as fossil fuel burning, land-use change or cement production over the past 250 years have given cause for concern that changes in Earth's climate system may progress at a much faster pace and larger extent than during the past 20 000 years. Investigating global carbon cycle pathways and finding suitable adaptation and mitigation strategies has, therefore, become of major concern in many research fields. The oceans have a key role in regulating atmospheric CO2 concentrations and currently take up about 25% of annual anthropogenic carbon emissions to the atmosphere. Questions that yet need to be answered are what the carbon uptake kinetics of the oceans will be in the future and how the increase in oceanic carbon inventory will affect its ecosystems and their services. This requires comprehensive investigations, including high-quality ocean carbon measurements on different spatial and temporal scales, the management of data in sophisticated databases, the application of Earth system models to provide future projections for given emission scenarios as well as a global synthesis and outreach to policy makers. In this paper, the current understanding of the ocean as an important carbon sink is reviewed with respect to these topics. Emphasis is placed on the complex interplay of different physical, chemical and biological processes that yield both positive and negative air–sea flux values for natural and anthropogenic CO2 as well as on increased CO2 (uptake) as the regulating force of the radiative warming of the atmosphere and the gradual acidification of the oceans. Major future ocean carbon challenges in the fields of ocean observations, modelling and process research as well as the relevance of other biogeochemical cycles and greenhouse gases are discussed.

Description: Dissolved oxygen (DO) concentration in the ocean is an important component of marine biogeochemical cycles and will be greatly altered as climate change persists. In this study a global oceanic carbon cycle model (HAMOCC 2.0) is used to address how mechanisms of oxygen minimum zones (OMZ) expansion respond to changes in CO2 radiative forcing. Atmospheric pCO2 is increased at a rate of 1% annually and the model is stabilized at 2 X, 4 X, 6 X, and 8 X preindustrial pCO2 levels. With an increase in CO2 radiative forcing, the OMZ in the Pacific Ocean is controlled largely by changes in particulate organic carbon (POC) export, resulting in increased remineralization and thus expanding the oxygen minimum zones within the tropical Pacific Ocean. A potential decline in primary producers in the future as a result of environmental stress due to ocean warming and acidification could lead to a substantial reduction of vertical carbon flux and thus increased DO concentration particularly in the Pacific Ocean at a depth of 600-800 m. In contrast, the vertical expansion of the OMZs within the Atlantic and Indian Oceans are linked to reduced oxygen solubility due to rise in potential temperature and to a lesser extent changes in remineralization rates. Changes in oxygen solubility also lead to the formation of a new OMZ in the western subtrobical Pacific Ocean. The development of the new OMZ results in dissolved oxygen concentration of ≤50 μmols throughout the equatorial Pacific Ocean at 4 times preindustrial pCO2. Total ocean area with dissolved oxygen concentrations of ≤50 μmols increases by 2.5%, 4.5%, and 7.6% for the 2 X, 4X, and 8 X CO2 simulations, respectively.

Description: The land and ocean absorb on average just over half of the anthropogenic emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) every year. These CO2 "sinks" are modulated by climate change and variability. Here we use a suite of nine dynamic global vegetation models (DGVMs) and four ocean biogeochemical general circulation models (OBGCMs) to estimate trends driven by global and regional climate and atmospheric CO2 in land and oceanic CO2 exchanges with the atmosphere over the period 1990–2009, to attribute these trends to underlying processes in the models, and to quantify the uncertainty and level of inter-model agreement. The models were forced with reconstructed climate fields and observed global atmospheric CO2; land use and land cover changes are not included for the DGVMs. Over the period 1990–2009, the DGVMs simulate a mean global land carbon sink of −2.4 ± 0.7 Pg C yr−1 with a small significant trend of −0.06 ± 0.03 Pg C yr−2 (increasing sink). Over the more limited period 1990–2004, the ocean models simulate a mean ocean sink of −2.2 ± 0.2 Pg C yr−1 with a trend in the net C uptake that is indistinguishable from zero (−0.01 ± 0.02 Pg C yr−2). The two ocean models that extended the simulations until 2009 suggest a slightly stronger, but still small, trend of −0.02 ± 0.01 Pg C yr−2. Trends from land and ocean models compare favourably to the land greenness trends from remote sensing, atmospheric inversion results, and the residual land sink required to close the global carbon budget. Trends in the land sink are driven by increasing net primary production (NPP), whose statistically significant trend of 0.22 ± 0.08 Pg C yr−2 exceeds a significant trend in heterotrophic respiration of 0.16 ± 0.05 Pg C yr−2 – primarily as a consequence of widespread CO2 fertilisation of plant production. Most of the land-based trend in simulated net carbon uptake originates from natural ecosystems in the tropics (−0.04 ± 0.01 Pg C yr−2), with almost no trend over the northern land region, where recent warming and reduced rainfall offsets the positive impact of elevated atmospheric CO2 and changes in growing season length on carbon storage. The small uptake trend in the ocean models emerges because climate variability and change, and in particular increasing sea surface temperatures, tend to counter-act the trend in ocean uptake driven by the increase in atmospheric CO2. Large uncertainty remains in the magnitude and sign of modelled carbon trends in several regions, as well as regarding the influence of land use and land cover changes on regional trends.

Description: During the fifth phase of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP5) substantial efforts were carried out on the systematic assessment of the skill of Earth system models. One goal was to check how realistically representative marine biogeochemical tracer distributions could be reproduced by models. Mean-state assessments routinely compared model hindcasts to available modern biogeochemical observations. However, these assessments considered neither the extent of equilibrium in modeled biogeochemical reservoirs nor the sensitivity of model performance to initial conditions or to the spin-up protocols. Here, we explore how the large diversity in spin-up protocols used for marine biogeochemistry in CMIP5 Earth system models (ESM) contribute to model-to-model differences in the simulated fields. We take advantage of a 500 year spin-up simulation of IPSL-CM5A-LR to quantify the influence of the spin-up protocol on model ability to reproduce relevant data fields. Amplification of biases in selected biogeochemical fields (O2, NO3, Alk-DIC) is assessed as a function of spin-up duration. We demonstrate that a relationship between spin-up duration and assessment metrics emerges from our model results and is consistent when confronted against a larger ensemble of CMIP5 models. This shows that drift has implications on their performance assessment in addition to possibly aliasing estimates of climate change impact. Our study suggests that differences in spin-up protocols could explain a substantial part of model disparities, constituting a source of model-to-model uncertainty. This requires more attention in future model intercomparison exercices in order to provide realistic ESM results on marine biogeochemistry and carbon cycle feedbacks.