Two decades of ocean CO$_2$ sink and variability - Bioemco
Journal Articles Tellus B - Chemical and Physical Meteorology Year : 2003

Two decades of ocean CO$_2$ sink and variability

Abstract

Atmospheric CO$_ 2$has increased at a nearly identical average rate of 3.3 and 3.2 Pg C yr$^{-1}$ for the decades of the 1980s and the 1990s, in spite of a large increase in fossil fuel emissions from 5.4 to 6.3 Pg C yr$^{-1}$ Thus, the sum of the ocean and land CO$_2$ sinks was 1 Pg C yr$^{-1}$ larger in the 1990s than in to the 1980s. Here we quantify the ocean and land sinks for these two decades using recent atmospheric inversions and ocean models. The ocean and land sinks are estimated to be, respectively, 0.3 (0.1 to 0.6) and 0.7 (0.4 to 0.9) Pg C yr$^{-1}$ larger in the 1990s than in the 1980s. When variability less than 5 yr is removed, all estimates show a global oceanic sink more or less steadily increasing with time, and a large anomaly in the land sink during 1990-1994. For year-to-year variability, all estimates show 1/3 to 1/2 less variability in the ocean than on land, but the amplitude and phase of the oceanic variability remain poorly determined. A mean oceanic sink of 1.9 Pg C yr$^{-1}$ for the 1990s based on O$_2$ observations corrected for ocean outgassing is supported by these estimates, but an uncertainty on the mean value of the order of $\pm$0.7 Pg C yr$^{-1}$ remains. The difference between the two decades appears to be more robust than the absolute value of either of the two decades.
Fichier principal
Vignette du fichier
2003_Le Quéré_Tellus_1.pdf (393.58 Ko) Télécharger le fichier
Origin Publisher files allowed on an open archive
Loading...

Dates and versions

bioemco-00175988 , version 1 (31-05-2020)

Identifiers

Cite

Corinne Le Quéré, Olivier Aumont, Laurent Bopp, Philippe Bousquet, Philippe Ciais, et al.. Two decades of ocean CO$_2$ sink and variability. Tellus B - Chemical and Physical Meteorology, 2003, 55B, pp.649-656. ⟨10.1034/j.1600-0889.2003.00043.x⟩. ⟨bioemco-00175988⟩
241 View
242 Download

Altmetric

Share

More