Winter weather controls net influx of atmospheric CO₂ on the north-west European shelf.

ABSTRACT: Shelf seas play an important role in the global carbon cycle, absorbing atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO₂) and exporting carbon (C) to the open ocean and sediments. The magnitude of these processes is poorly constrained, because observations are typically interpolated over multiple years. Here, we used 298500 observations of CO₂ fugacity (fCO₂) from a single year (2015), to estimate the net influx of atmospheric CO₂ as 26.2 ± 4.7 Tg C yr^-1 over the open NW European shelf. CO₂ influx from the atmosphere was dominated by influx during winter as a consequence of high winds, despite a smaller, thermally-driven, air-sea fCO₂ gradient compared to the larger, biologically-driven summer gradient. In order to understand this

SUBMITTER: Kitidis V 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6934492 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature