Zemskova, V., and Hong, F. (2025)
Presented at:
AGU Annual Meeting 2025Oceans play a critical role in moderating atmospheric carbon dioxide levels as they are one of the largest carbon sinks. Understanding where carbon is stored and how it circulates within the ocean interior is instrumental to estimating the ocean’s ability to mitigate climate change. However, it has been challenging to quantify the rate of carbon uptake by the ocean due to 1) the paucity of observational measurements of dissolved carbon concentrations in the ocean interior and 2) the difficulty in partitioning the local changes in dissolved carbon concentrations into the component that is due to natural temporal patterns in ocean circulation and the component that is due to uptake of anthropogenic carbon from the atmosphere. To address these challenges, we use the output from the ECCO-Darwin model, which is a global ocean circulation model constrained by observational data and that couples physical and biogeochemical oceanic processes. Such dataset allows us compute trends in the ocean carbon storage over three decades (1992-2022) at regular spatial and temporal intervals. We also decompose the oceanic carbon concentrations into the natural and anthropogenic components to consider temporal changes in the spatial patterns of ocean carbon uptake, importantly, over the period of global warming hiatus in the early 2000s and the subsequent period of resumed increase in global mean temperature.
