Interannual Variability of Equatorial Pacific CO₂ Fluxes Estimated from Temperature and Salinity Data

Harilaos Loukos (1) , Frédéric Vivier (2) , P. P. Murphy (3) , D. E. Harrison (4) , Corinne Le Quéré (5)

1 LODYC - Laboratoire d'océanographie dynamique et de climatologie
2 APL-UW - Applied Physics Laboratory [Seattle]
3 NODC - NOAA National Oceanographic Data Center
4 PMEL - NOAA Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory [Seattle]
5 LSCE - Laboratoire des Sciences du Climat et de l'Environnement [Gif-sur-Yvette]

Based on atmospheric data and models, the tropical CO₂ source anomaly reaches up to 2 GtC yr^-1, but the respective contributions of the terrestrial biosphere and the oceans to this flux are difficult to quantify. Here we present a new method for estimating CO₂ fluxes from oceanic observations based on the surprisingly good predic-tive skill of temperature and salinity for surface dissolved inorganic carbon. Using historical temperature and salin-ity data, we reconstruct the basin scale CO₂ flux to the atmosphere in the equatorial Pacific from 1982 to 1993. We find that interannual anomalies do not exceed 0.4 4-0.2 GtC yr^-1 which suggests that up to 80% of the tropical CO₂ source anomaly is due to the terrestrial biosphere.

Domaines: Géophysique [physics.geo-ph]; Géophysique [physics.geo-ph]

Harilaos Loukos, Frédéric Vivier, P. P. Murphy, D. E. Harrison, Corinne Le Quéré. Interannual Variability of Equatorial Pacific CO₂ Fluxes Estimated from Temperature and Salinity Data. Geophysical Research Letters, 2000, 27 (12), pp.1735-1738. ⟨10.1029/1999GL011013⟩. ⟨hal-00125008⟩