Global application

Global application of the FluxEngine

The FluxEngine is an open source tool for calculating atmosphere-ocean gas fluxes. For this example global application of the FluxEngine, it was run for the years 1995-2009 to produce a time series global atmosphere-ocean fluxes of the gas carbon dioxide (CO2). The partial pressure of CO2 in sea water, pCO2w, was derived from global measurements, whilst wind speed and sea surface temperature data were derived from satellite earth observations.

Time series of global and regional mean air-sea CO2 fluxes in Pg C year-1 (reproduced from section 2a of Shutler et al., 2016). The grey shaded area represents the uncertainty in the global air-sea fluxes due to the known uncertainties in the input data

This figure shows an example mean atmosphere-ocean CO2 flux for the year 2000 :

Global annually averaged mean air-sea CO2 flux per day in g C m-2 day-1 for 2000.

The OceanFlux Greenhouse Gases Evolution project are now using the FluxEngine to gain a better understanding of the variability of the oceanic sink of CO2 and the mechanisms that drive the gas exchange.

Reference

Shutler JD, Land PE, Piolle J-F, Woolf DK, Goddijn-Murphy L, Paul F, Girard-Ardhuin F, Chapron B, Donlon CJ (2016), FluxEngine: a flexible processing system for calculating atmosphere-ocean carbon dioxide gas fluxes and climatologies, Journal of Atmospheric and Oceanic Technology, doi: 10.1175/JTECH-D-14-00204.1. link