ALBERT

Description: Author Posting. © American Geophysical Union, 2021. This article is posted here by permission of American Geophysical Union for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Journal of Geophysical Research: Oceans 126(8), (2021): e2021JC017510, https://doi.org/10.1029/2021JC017510.

Description: The air-sea exchange of oxygen (O2) is driven by changes in solubility, biological activity, and circulation. The total air-sea exchange of O2 has been shown to be closely related to the air-sea exchange of heat on seasonal timescales, with the ratio of the seasonal flux of O2 to heat varying with latitude, being higher in the extratropics and lower in the subtropics. This O2/heat ratio is both a fundamental biogeochemical property of air-sea exchange and a convenient metric for testing earth system models. Current estimates of the O2/heat flux ratio rely on sparse observations of dissolved O2, leaving it fairly unconstrained. From a model ensemble we show that the ratio of the seasonal amplitude of two atmospheric tracers, atmospheric potential oxygen (APO) and the argon-to-nitrogen ratio (Ar/O2), exhibits a close relationship to the O2/heat ratio of the extratropics (40–70°). The amplitude ratio, A APO/A ArN2, is relatively constant within the extratropics of each hemisphere due to the zonal mixing of the atmosphere. A APO/A ArN2 is not sensitive to atmospheric transport, as most of the observed spatial variability in the seasonal amplitude of δAPO is compensated by similar variations in δ(Ar/N2). From the relationship between O2/heat and A APO/A ArN2 in the model ensemble, we determine that the atmospheric observations suggest hemispherically distinct O2/heat flux ratios of 3.3 ± 0.3 and 4.7 ± 0.8 nmol J-1 between 40 and 70° in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres respectively, providing a useful constraint for O2 and heat air-sea fluxes in earth system models and observation-based data products.

Description: The recent atmospheric measurements of the Scripps program have been supported via funding from the NSF and the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) under grants 1304270 and OAR-CIPO-2015-2004269. M. Manizza and R. F. Keeling thank NSF for financial support via the OCE-1130976 grant. M. Manizza thanks additional financial support from NSF via the ARRA OCE-0850350 grant. S. C. Doney acknowledges support from NSF PLR-1440435. Keith Rodgers acknowledges support from IBS-R028-D1. Gael Forget and the ECCO group kindly provided the ECCOv4 heat fluxes.

Description: 2022-01-22

Description: 〈jats:p〉Abstract. Accurate assessment of anthropogenic carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions and their redistribution among the atmosphere, ocean, and terrestrial biosphere in a changing climate is critical to better understand the global carbon cycle, support the development of climate policies, and project future climate change. Here we describe and synthesize data sets and methodology to quantify the five major components of the global carbon budget and their uncertainties. Fossil CO2 emissions (EFOS) are based on energy statistics and cement production data, while emissions from land-use change (ELUC), mainly deforestation, are based on land-use and land-use change data and bookkeeping models. Atmospheric CO2 concentration is measured directly, and its growth rate (GATM) is computed from the annual changes in concentration. The ocean CO2 sink (SOCEAN) is estimated with global ocean biogeochemistry models and observation-based fCO2 products. The terrestrial CO2 sink (SLAND) is estimated with dynamic global vegetation models. Additional lines of evidence on land and ocean sinks are provided by atmospheric inversions, atmospheric oxygen measurements, and Earth system models. The resulting carbon budget imbalance (BIM), the difference between the estimated total emissions and the estimated changes in the atmosphere, ocean, and terrestrial biosphere, is a measure of imperfect data and incomplete understanding of the contemporary carbon cycle. All uncertainties are reported as ±1σ. For the year 2022, EFOS increased by 0.9 % relative to 2021, with fossil emissions at 9.9±0.5 Gt C yr−1 (10.2±0.5 Gt C yr−1 when the cement carbonation sink is not included), and ELUC was 1.2±0.7 Gt C yr−1, for a total anthropogenic CO2 emission (including the cement carbonation sink) of 11.1±0.8 Gt C yr−1 (40.7±3.2 Gt CO2 yr−1). Also, for 2022, GATM was 4.6±0.2 Gt C yr−1 (2.18±0.1 ppm yr−1; ppm denotes parts per million), SOCEAN was 2.8±0.4 Gt C yr−1, and SLAND was 3.8±0.8 Gt C yr−1, with a BIM of −0.1 Gt C yr−1 (i.e. total estimated sources marginally too low or sinks marginally too high). The global atmospheric CO2 concentration averaged over 2022 reached 417.1±0.1 ppm. Preliminary data for 2023 suggest an increase in EFOS relative to 2022 of +1.1 % (0.0 % to 2.1 %) globally and atmospheric CO2 concentration reaching 419.3 ppm, 51 % above the pre-industrial level (around 278 ppm in 1750). Overall, the mean of and trend in the components of the global carbon budget are consistently estimated over the period 1959–2022, with a near-zero overall budget imbalance, although discrepancies of up to around 1 Gt C yr−1 persist for the representation of annual to semi-decadal variability in CO2 fluxes. Comparison of estimates from multiple approaches and observations shows the following: (1) a persistent large uncertainty in the estimate of land-use changes emissions, (2) a low agreement between the different methods on the magnitude of the land CO2 flux in the northern extra-tropics, and (3) a discrepancy between the different methods on the strength of the ocean sink over the last decade. This living-data update documents changes in methods and data sets applied to this most recent global carbon budget as well as evolving community understanding of the global carbon cycle. The data presented in this work are available at https://doi.org/10.18160/GCP-2023 (Friedlingstein et al., 2023). 〈/jats:p〉

Description: The Southern Ocean plays a critical role in the global climate system by mediating atmosphere–ocean partitioning of heat and carbon dioxide. However, Earth system models are demonstrably deficient in the Southern Ocean, leading to large uncertainties in future air–sea CO2 flux projections under climate warming and incomplete interpretations of natural variability on interannual to geologic time scales. Here, we describe a recent aircraft observational campaign, the O2/N2 Ratio and CO2 Airborne Southern Ocean (ORCAS) study, which collected measurements over the Southern Ocean during January and February 2016. The primary research objective of the ORCAS campaign was to improve observational constraints on the seasonal exchange of atmospheric carbon dioxide and oxygen with the Southern Ocean. The campaign also included measurements of anthropogenic and marine biogenic reactive gases; high-resolution, hyperspectral ocean color imaging of the ocean surface; and microphysical data relevant for understanding and modeling cloud processes. In each of these components of the ORCAS project, the campaign has significantly expanded the amount of observational data available for this remote region. Ongoing research based on these observations will contribute to advancing our understanding of this climatically important system across a range of topics including carbon cycling, atmospheric chemistry and transport, and cloud physics. This article presents an overview of the scientific and methodological aspects of the ORCAS project and highlights early findings.