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Observation‐Based Trends of the Southern Ocean Carbon Sink
Author(s) -
Ritter R.,
Landschützer P.,
Gruber N.,
Fay A. R.,
Iida Y.,
Jones S.,
Nakaoka S.,
Park G.H.,
Peylin P.,
Rödenbeck C.,
Rodgers K. B.,
Shutler J. D.,
Zeng J.
Publication year - 2017
Publication title -
geophysical research letters
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 2.007
H-Index - 273
eISSN - 1944-8007
pISSN - 0094-8276
DOI - 10.1002/2017gl074837
Subject(s) - extrapolation , environmental science , sink (geography) , carbon sink , trend analysis , climatology , geography , statistics , oceanography , mathematics , geology , climate change , cartography
The Southern Ocean (SO) carbon sink has strengthened substantially since the year 2000, following a decade of a weakening trend. However, the surface ocean p CO 2 data underlying this trend reversal are sparse, requiring a substantial amount of extrapolation to map the data. Here we use nine different p CO 2 mapping products to investigate the SO trends and their sensitivity to the mapping procedure. We find a robust temporal coherence for the entire SO, with eight of the nine products agreeing on the sign of the decadal trends, that is, a weakening CO 2 sink trend in the 1990s (on average 0.22 ± 0.24 Pg C yr −1 decade −1 ), and a strengthening sink trend during the 2000s (−0.35 ± 0.23 Pg C yr −1 decade −1 ). Spatially, the multiproduct mean reveals rather uniform trends, but the confidence is limited, given the small number of statistically significant trends from the individual products, particularly during the data‐sparse 1990–1999 period.