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The OceanFlux Greenhouse Gases methodology for deriving a sea surface climatology of CO2 fugacity in support of air--sea gas flux studies.
- Source :
- Ocean Science; 2015, Vol. 11 Issue 4, p519-541, 23p
- Publication Year :
- 2015
-
Abstract
- Climatologies, or long-term averages, of essential climate variables are useful for evaluating models and providing a baseline for studying anomalies. The Surface Ocean CO<subscript>2</subscript> Atlas (SOCAT) has made millions of global underway sea surface measurements of CO<subscript>2</subscript> publicly available, all in a uniform format and presented as fugacity, fCO<subscript>2</subscript>. As fCO<subscript>2</subscript> is highly sensitive to temperature, the measurements are only valid for the instantaneous sea surface temperature (SST) that is measured concurrently with the in-water CO<subscript>2</subscript> measurement. To create a climatology of fCO<subscript>2</subscript> data suitable for calculating air-sea CO<subscript>2</subscript> fluxes, it is therefore desirable to calculate fCO<subscript>2</subscript> valid for a more consistent and averaged SST. This paper presents the OceanFlux Greenhouse Gases methodology for creating such a climatology. We recomputed SOCAT's fCO<subscript>2</subscript> values for their respective measurement month and year using monthly composite SST data on a 1° x 1° grid from satellite Earth observation and then extrapolated the resulting fCO2 values to reference year 2010. The data were then spatially interpolated onto a 1° x 1° grid of the global oceans to produce 12 monthly fCO<subscript>2</subscript> distributions for 2010, including the prediction errors of fCO<subscript>2</subscript> produced by the spatial interpolation technique. The partial pressure of CO2 (pCO2) is also provided for those who prefer to use pCO<subscript>2</subscript>. The CO<subscript>2</subscript> concentration difference between ocean and atmosphere is the thermodynamic driving force of the air-sea CO<subscript>2</subscript> flux, and hence the presented fCO<subscript>2</subscript> distributions can be used in air-sea gas flux calculations together with climatologies of other climate variables. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
Details
- Language :
- English
- ISSN :
- 18120784
- Volume :
- 11
- Issue :
- 4
- Database :
- Complementary Index
- Journal :
- Ocean Science
- Publication Type :
- Academic Journal
- Accession number :
- 109261577
- Full Text :
- https://doi.org/10.5194/os-11-519-2015