The oceanic sink for anthropogenic CO2 from 1994 to 2007

By N. Gruber, D. Clement, B. Carter, R. Feely, Steven van Heuven, M. Hoppema, M. Ishii, R. Key, A. Kozyr, S. Lauvset and 8 more. Science, 2019

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The state of ocean CO2 uptake The ocean is an important sink for anthropogenic CO2 and has absorbed roughly 30% of our emissions between the beginning of the industrial revolution and the mid-1990s. This effect is an important moderator of climate change, but can we count on it to remain as strong in the future? Gruber et al. calculated the ocean uptake of anthropogenic CO2 for the interval from 1994 to 2007, which continued as expected. They also observed clear regional deviations from this pattern, suggesting that there is no guarantee that uptake will remain as robust with time. Science, this issue p. 1193 Ocean uptake of atmospheric CO2 continued apace between 1994 and 2007. We quantify the oceanic sink for anthropogenic carbon dioxide (CO2) over the period 1994 to 2007 by using observations from the global repeat hydrography program and contrasting them to observations from the 1990s. Using a linear regression–based method, we find a global increase in the anthropogenic CO2 inventory of 34 ± 4 petagrams of carbon (Pg C) between 1994 and 2007. This is equivalent to an average uptake rate of 2.6 ± 0.3 Pg C year−1 and represents 31 ± 4% of the global anthropogenic CO2 emissions over this period. Although this global ocean sink estimate is consistent with the expectation of the ocean uptake having increased in proportion to the rise in atmospheric CO2, substantial regional differences in storage rate are found, likely owing to climate variability–driven changes in ocean circulation.

Subfields: Atmospheric Science, Global and Planetary Change, Oceanography

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/404b9c229387ff6bcd0f3cb7a012c9d0f5c2cecb