Identification

Title

Internal climate variability modulates decadal changes in ocean anthropogenic carbon storage

Abstract

The ocean removes man-made (anthropogenic) carbon from the atmosphere and thereby mitigates climate change. Observations from global hydrographic surveys reveal the spatial and temporal evolution of the ocean inventory of anthropogenic carbon and suggest substantial decadal variability in historical storage rates. Here, we use a 100-member ensemble of an Earth system model to investigate the influence of external forcing and internal climate variability on historical changes in ocean anthropogenic carbon storage over 1994 to 2014. Our findings reveal that the externally forced, decadal changes in storage are largest in the Atlantic (2–4 mmol m −3 decade −1 ) and positive nearly everywhere. Internal climate variability modulates regional ocean anthropogenic carbon storage trends by up to 10 mmol m −3 decade −1 . The influence of internal climate variability on decadal storage changes is most prominent at depths of ∼300 m and at the edges of the subtropical gyres. Internal variability in anthropogenic carbon in the extratropics has high spectral power on decadal to multi-decadal timescales, indicating that the approximately decadal repetitions of hydrographic surveys may produce storage change estimates that are heavily influenced by internal climate variability.

Resource type

document

Resource locator

Unique resource identifier

code

https://n2t.net/ark:/85065/d7kp86hj

codeSpace

Dataset language

eng

Spatial reference system

code identifying the spatial reference system

Classification of spatial data and services

Topic category

geoscientificInformation

Keywords

Keyword set

keyword value

Text

originating controlled vocabulary

title

Resource Type

reference date

date type

publication

effective date

2016-01-01T00:00:00Z

Geographic location

West bounding longitude

East bounding longitude

North bounding latitude

South bounding latitude

Temporal reference

Temporal extent

Begin position

End position

Dataset reference date

date type

publication

effective date

2025-01-01T00:00:00Z

Frequency of update

Quality and validity

Lineage

Conformity

Data format

name of format

version of format

Constraints related to access and use

Constraint set

Use constraints

<span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:10pt;font-style:normal;" data-sheets-root="1">Copyright author(s). This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.</span>

Limitations on public access

None

Responsible organisations

Responsible party

contact position

OpenSky Support

organisation name

UCAR/NCAR - Library

full postal address

PO Box 3000

Boulder

80307-3000

email address

opensky@ucar.edu

web address

http://opensky.ucar.edu/

name: homepage

responsible party role

pointOfContact

Metadata on metadata

Metadata point of contact