An estimate of anthropogenic CO2 inventory from decadal changes in oceanic carbon content.

ABSTRACT: Increased knowledge of the present global carbon cycle is important for our ability to understand and to predict the future carbon cycle and global climate. Approximately half of the anthropogenic carbon released to the atmosphere from fossil fuel burning is stored in the ocean, although distribution and regional fluxes of the ocean sink are debated. Estimates of anthropogenic carbon (C(ant)) in the oceans remain prone to error arising from (i) a need to estimate preindustrial reference concentrations of carbon for different oceanic regions, and (ii) differing behavior of transient ocean tracers used to infer C(ant). We introduce an empirical approach to estimate C(ant) that circumvents both problems by using measurement of the decadal change of ocean carbon concentrations and the exponent

SUBMITTER: Tanhua T 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC1802019 | biostudies-literature | 2007 Feb

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature