To better understand climate variability and the Southern Ocean, researchers estimate spatial correlations of ocean properties to reveal how many observing platforms are necessary to adequately observe carbon and heat.
To better understand climate variability and the Southern Ocean, researchers estimate spatial correlations of ocean properties to reveal how many observing platforms are necessary to adequately observe carbon and heat.
A new study combines ocean observations with three state-of-the-art ocean models, revealing the full three-dimensional pathway of deep water to the surface of the Southern Ocean for the first time.
Approximately seven years of daily-averaged autonomous CO2 observations from NOAA’s Kuroshio Extension Observatory surface mooring were used to close the mixed-layer carbon budget, finding high rates of net community production during the spring bloom period.
The ocean carbon sink is a cumulative net sink of anthropogenic carbon from the atmosphere, having absorbed 41% of all emissions due to fossil fuel and cement manufacturing. New research uses a climate model to estimate when growth of the carbon sink could be detected from the noise of the natural variability.
The Southern Ocean plays a key role in mitigating the anthropogenic greenhouse emissions by contributing approximately 40% of the global oceanic carbon sink. Recent work investigates the future evolution of Southern Ocean carbon storage under a climate warming scenario.
The Southern Ocean absorbs a large fraction of anthropogenic-sourced carbon dioxide from the atmosphere each year, driving decreases in the pH and the carbonate ion concentration. A recent study reports a decrease in phytoplankton calcification in the Southern Ocean over the satellite record (1998 to 2014).
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