Interannual variations of the air-sea carbon dioxide exchange in the different regions of the Pacific Ocean
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Interannual variations of the air-sea carbon dioxide exchange in the different regions of the Pacific Ocean LI Yangchun1 , XU Yongfu1∗ 1
State Key Laboratory of Atmospheric Boundary Layer Physics and Atmospheric Chemistry, Institute of Atmospheric Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100029, China
Received 1 September 2011; accepted 28 April 2012 ©The Chinese Society of Oceanography and Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2013
Abstract Interannual variations of the air-sea CO2 exchange from 1965 to 2000 in the Pacific Ocean are studied with a Pacific Ocean model. Two numerical experiments are performed, including the control run that is forced by climatological monthly mean physical data and the climate-change run that is forced by interannually varying monthly mean physical data. Climatological monthly winds are used in both runs to calculate the coefficient of air-sea CO2 exchange. The analysis through the differences between the two runs shows that in the tropical Pacific the variation of export production induced by interannual variations of the physical fields is negatively correlated with that of the air-sea CO2 flux, while there is no correlation or a weak positive correlation in the subtropical North and South Pacific. It indicates that the variation of the physical fields can modulate the variation of the air-sea CO2 flux in converse ways in the tropical Pacific by changing the direct transport and biochemical process. Under the interannually varying monthly mean forcing, the simulated EOF1 of the air-sea CO2 flux is basically consistent with that of sea surface temperature (SST) in the tropical Pacific, but contrary in the two subtropical Pacific Ocean. The correlation coefficient between the regionally integrated air-sea CO2 flux and area-mean SST shows that when the air-sea CO2 flux lags SST by about 5 months, the positive coefficient in the three regions is largest, indicating that in the tropical Pacific or on the longer time scale in the three regions, physical processes control the flux-SST relationship. Key words: air-sea carbon dioxide exchange, surface temperature, export production, interannual variations, Pacific Ocean Citation: Li Yangchun, Xu Yongfu. 2013. Interannual variations of the air-sea carbon dioxide exchange in the different regions of the Pacific Ocean. Acta Oceanologica Sinica, 32(3): 71–79, doi: 10.1007/s13131-013-0291-7
1 Introduction Since the Industrial Revolution, about half of the total anthropogenic CO2 released by human activities has remained in the atmosphere, and the other half has been absorbed by the ocean and land, so that atmospheric CO2 concentrations have increased by over 100 ppmv. Keeling et al. (1989) and Keeling et al. (1995) have analyzed the data of atmospheric CO2 obtained at Mauna Loa since 1958, and pointed out that except for impacts of human activities, the atmospheric CO2 concentration exhibits an obvious natural variation. So far, it has been considered that the interannual variation of the basin-scale air-sea CO2 flux does not exceed ±0.4 P
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