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The Weddell Gyre mediates carbon exchange between the abyssal ocean and atmosphere, which is critical to global climate. This region also features large and highly variable freshwater fluxes due to seasonal sea ice, net precipitation, and glacial melt; however, the impact of these freshwater fluxes on the regional carbon cycle has not been fully appreciated. Using a novel budget analysis of dissolved inorganic carbon (DIC) mass in the Biogeochemical Southern Ocean State Estimate, we highlight two freshwater‐driven transports. Where freshwater with minimal DIC enters the ocean, it displaces DIC‐rich seawater outwards, driving a lateral transport of 75 ± 5 Tg DIC/year. Additionally, sea ice export requires a compensating import of seawater, which carries 48 ± 11 Tg DIC/year into the gyre. Though often overlooked, these freshwater displacement effects are of leading order in the Weddell Gyre carbon budget in the state estimate and in regrouped box‐inversion estimates, with implications for evaluating basin‐scale carbon transport. Plain Language Summary: The ocean surrounding Antarctica plays a key role in the global carbon cycle because it is one of the few places where carbon‐enriched abyssal waters can exchange with the atmosphere. Here we focus on the Weddell Gyre that covers the Atlantic sector poleward of 60°S; this region features enormous exchanges of freshwater through the surface, via sea ice that covers the region each winter, frequent precipitation, and land ice melting into the ocean. Using a model that assimilates available observations, we explore how this freshwater affects the region's ability to transport carbon between the atmosphere and deep ocean. Whereas previous studies have focused on how springtime sea ice melt dilutes surface ocean carbon concentrations, we emphasize that throughout the year, adding water with minimal carbon (from rain, snow, or land ice) to the ocean displaces carbon‐rich seawater. Second, sea ice melt and formation alone do not displace seawater, but when sea ice flows out of the region, carbon‐rich seawater responds by flowing in the opposite direction. These freshwater displacement effects are leading order terms of the regional carbon budget in our model analysis and in our reconsideration of past observational estimates. Key Points: Displacement of seawater by net precipitation and glacial melt is a leading order term in Weddell Gyre dissolved inorganic carbon (DIC) budgetEvidence is provided by quantifying the DIC mass budget in Biogeochemical Southern Ocean State Estimate (B‐SOSE) and regrouping published box inversion resultsIn the B‐SOSE mean, freshwater displaces 75 Tg DIC/yr, whereas sea ice export drives a 48 Tg DIC/yr lateral import [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We analyze 15‐year of observational data and a 5‐year Southern Ocean model simulation to quantify the transformation rates of Circumpolar Deep Water (CDW) and the associated heat loss to the surface. This study finds that over the continental shelves of East Antarctica and the Weddell and Ross Seas, surface buoyancy fluxes transform ∼4.4 Sv of surface waters into CDW, providing a path for CDW to lose heat to the surface. In addition, ∼6.6 Sv of CDW are mixed with surface waters in the Weddell and Ross subpolar gyres. In contrast, enhanced stratification inhibits the outcropping of CDW isopycnals, reducing their transformation rates by a factor of ∼8 over the continental shelf and by a factor of ∼3 over the deeper ocean in the Amundsen and Bellingshausen Seas. The CDW retains its offshore warm properties as it intrudes over the continental shelves, resulting in elevated bottom temperatures there. This analysis demonstrates the importance of processes in subpolar gyres to erode CDW and to facilitate further transformation on the continental shelves, significantly reducing the heat able to access ice shelf fronts. This sheltering effect is strongest in the western Weddell Sea and tends to diminish toward the east, which helps explain the large zonal differences in continental‐shelf bottom temperatures and the melt rates of Antarctic ice shelves. Plain Language Summary: The continental slope around Antarctica acts as a barrier to deep and warmer offshore waters that can bring heat to the glaciers along the coastline, enhancing their melt rate and contributing to global sea level rise. Around the Antarctic continent these offshore waters, the so‐called Circumpolar Deep Waters, differ in their ability to cross this barrier while retaining their heat, explaining to a large extent why West Antarctic glaciers melt much faster than other Antarctic ice sheets. We study the properties of the warm waters over the continental shelf and offshore regions and contrast them across regions. We show that in East Antarctica, the Ross Sea, and the Weddell Sea, deep warm waters are brought to the surface where they lose heat and mix with surface waters. However, in the Amundsen and Bellingshausen Seas, the warm water is insulated from the surface by land run‐off of fresher and lighter waters that occupy the surface. These results highlight the importance of the subpolar gyres in sheltering Antarctic glaciers. Key Points: Intense Circumpolar Deep Water (CDW) transformation in subpolar gyres (∼−6.6 Sv) reduces heat content on adjacent shelvesMean CDW transformation rates are ∼8 times smaller on the Amundsen and Bellingshausen continental shelves than on othersLocal stratification around Antarctica correlates with CDW layer depth and bottom temperatures on the shelf [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The origins of the upper limb of the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation and the partition among different routes has been quantified with models at eddy-permitting and one eddy-resolving model or with low-resolution models assimilating observations. Here, a step toward bridging this gap is taken by using the Southern Ocean State Estimate (SOSE) at the eddy-permitting 1/6° horizontal resolution to compute Lagrangian diagnostics from virtual particle trajectories advected between 6.7°S and two meridional sections: one at Drake Passage (cold route) and the other from South Africa to Antarctica (warm route). Our results agree with the prevailing concept attributing the largest transport contribution to the warm route with 12.3 Sv (88%) (1 Sv ≡ 106 m3 s−1) compared with 1.7 Sv (12%) for the cold route. These results are compared with a similar Lagrangian experiment performed with the lower-resolution state estimate from Estimating the Circulation and Climate of the Ocean. Eulerian and Lagrangian means highlight an overall increase in the transport of the major South Atlantic currents with finer resolution, resulting in a relatively larger contribution from the cold route. In particular, the Malvinas Current to Antarctic Circumpolar Current (MC/ACC) ratio plays a more important role on the routes partition than the increased Agulhas Leakage. The relative influence of the mean flow versus the eddy flow on the routes partition is investigated by computing the mean and eddy kinetic energies and the Lagrangian-based eddy diffusivity. Lagrangian diffusivity estimates are largest in the Agulhas and Malvinas regions but advection by the mean flow dominates everywhere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An eddy-permitting general circulation model of the Southern Ocean is fit by constrained least squares to a large observational dataset during 2005–06. Data used include Argo float profiles, CTD synoptic sections, Southern Elephant Seals as Oceanographic Samplers (SEaOS) instrument-mounted seal profiles, XBTs, altimetric observations [ Envisat, Geosat, Jason-1, and Ocean Topography Experiment (TOPEX)/Poseidon], and infrared and microwave radiometer observed sea surface temperature. An adjoint model is used to determine descent directions in minimizing a misfit function, each of whose elements has been weighted by an estimate of the observational plus model error. The model is brought into near agreement with the data by adjusting its control vector, here consisting of initial and meteorological boundary conditions. Although total consistency has not yet been achieved, the existing solution is in good agreement with the great majority of the 2005 and 2006 Southern Ocean observations and better represents these data than does the World Ocean Atlas 2001 ( WOA01) climatological product. The estimate captures the oceanic temporal variability and in this respect represents a major improvement upon earlier static inverse estimates. During the estimation period, the Drake Passage volume transport is 153 ± 5 Sv (1 Sv ≡ 106 m3 s−1). The Ross and Weddell polar gyre transports are 20 ± 5 Sv and 40 ± 8 Sv, respectively. Across 32°S there is a surface meridional overturning cell of 12 ± 12 Sv, an intermediate cell of 17 ± 12 Sv, and an abyssal cell of 13 ± 6 Sv. The northward heat and freshwater anomaly transports across 30°S are −0.3 PW and 0.7 Sv, with estimated uncertainties of 0.5 PW and 0.2 Sv. The net rate of wind work is 2.1 ± 1.1 TW. Southern Ocean theories involving short temporal- and spatial-scale dynamics may now be tested with a dynamically and thermodynamically realistic general circulation model solution that is known to be compatible with the modern observational datasets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]