Dataset: Carbon Survey

The DOE/NOAA cosponsored global carbon survey produced over an order of magnitude more high-quality carbon measurements than previous survey efforts. These data provide an important asset to the scientific community investigating carbon cycling in the oceans.Most of the data have been reported to national archive facilities, but have not been synthesized into a unified, internally consistent global data set. The central objective of this proposal is to generate that unified data set and to determine the global distribution and inventories of both natural and anthropogenic carbon species. These estimates will be used to infer the rate of anthropogenic CO₂ uptake in the oceans and to evaluate numerical ocean carbon models. These estimates also provide an important benchmark against which future observational studies will be compared.

To accomplish this task, a number of additional products will be generated which will directly benefit the scientific community. The first will be improved global estimates of thermocline ventilation rates and chlorofluorocarbon-based water mass ages. We will also provide empirical equations for estimating surface carbon distributions from conservative parameters and a field-based evaluation of the carbon dissociation constants. A careful examination of the new data set will allow us to evaluate optimal sampling strategies for the future and an evaluation of the technology necessary to properly address remaining questions on the cycling of carbon in the oceans. This work will directly address the OACES and DOE goals of improving our ability to observe, understand, predict, and respond to changes in the global environment.

CDIAC data download site: http://cdiac.ornl.gov/oceans/glodap/data_files.html