Abstract
Contrasting decrease and increase trends of sea surface temperature (SST) have been documented in the western Subarctic (WSA) and the rest of the Northwest Pacific (NWP) from 1958 to 2017, respectively. Consequently, more (less) total carbon dioxide (TCO2) due to ocean cooling (warming) is transported to the surface, which leads to increase (decrease) of oceanic surface partial pressure of carbon dioxide (pCO2). With the combined influence of the rising atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) level and changing ocean conditions, a prominent increase in oceanic surface pCO2 occurred with different rates of increase in summer and winter in the NWP. The oceanic surface pCO2 is mainly controlled by the variation of TCO2 at the interdecadal timescale and by SST at the seasonal timescale. Our results also indicate that increasing SST tends to strengthen the capability of ocean in absorbing anthropogenic CO2 in the NWP, while ocean’s uptaking ability is weakened in the cooling area of the WSA.
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Acknowledgements
We benefited from numerous data sets made freely available, and those include OISST V2 high resolution dataset (https://www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/cgi-bin/db_search/DBListFiles.pl?did=132&tid=70176&vid=2423) and monthly gridded SOCAT V6 (https://www.socat.info/index.php/data-access/).
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Foundation item: The National Key Research and Development Program of China under contract No. 2016YFC1401605; the Project of Southern Marine Science and Engineering Guangdong Laboratory (Zhuhai) under contract No. SML2020SP008; the Open Fund of Marine Telemetry Technology Innovation Center of the Ministry of Natural Resources; the National Natural Science Foundation of China under contract No. 41730536; the Key Laboratory of Space Ocean Remote Sensing and Application, Ministry of Natural Resources under contract No. 201901001.
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Ji, X., Chai, F., Xiu, P. et al. Long-term trend of oceanic surface carbon in the Northwest Pacific from 1958 to 2017. Acta Oceanol. Sin. 41, 90–98 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13131-021-1953-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13131-021-1953-5