Publication Date:
2009-12-08
Description:
The oceans are a major sink for atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2). Historically, observations have been too sparse to allow accurate tracking of changes in rates of CO2 uptake over ocean basins, so little is known about how these vary. Here, we show observations indicating substantial variability in the CO2 uptake by the North Atlantic on time scales of a few years. Further, we use measurements from a coordinated network of instrumented commercial ships to define the annual flux into the North Atlantic, for the year 2005, to a precision of about 10%. This approach offers the prospect of accurately monitoring the changing ocean CO2 sink for those ocean basins that are well covered by shipping routes.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Notes: 〈/span〉Watson, Andrew J -- Schuster, Ute -- Bakker, Dorothee C E -- Bates, Nicholas R -- Corbiere, Antoine -- Gonzalez-Davila, Melchor -- Friedrich, Tobias -- Hauck, Judith -- Heinze, Christoph -- Johannessen, Truls -- Kortzinger, Arne -- Metzl, Nicolas -- Olafsson, Jon -- Olsen, Are -- Oschlies, Andreas -- Padin, X Antonio -- Pfeil, Benjamin -- Santana-Casiano, J Magdalena -- Steinhoff, Tobias -- Telszewski, Maciej -- Rios, Aida F -- Wallace, Douglas W R -- Wanninkhof, Rik -- New York, N.Y. -- Science. 2009 Dec 4;326(5958):1391-3. doi: 10.1126/science.1177394.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Author address: 〈/span〉School of Environmental Sciences, University of East Anglia, Norwich NR4 7TJ, UK. a.watson@uea.ac.uk〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Record origin:〈/span〉 〈a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19965756" target="_blank"〉PubMed〈/a〉
Print ISSN:
0036-8075
Electronic ISSN:
1095-9203
Topics:
Biology
,
Chemistry and Pharmacology
,
Computer Science
,
Medicine
,
Natural Sciences in General
,
Physics
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