An optimal transformation method applied to diagnose the ocean carbon budget

Abstract

The ocean carbon sink plays a critical role in climate, absorbing anthropogenic carbon from the atmosphere and mitigating climate change. The sink shows significant variability on decadal timescales, but estimates from models and observations disagree with one another, raising uncertainty over the magnitude of the sink, its variability, and its driving mechanisms. There is a need to reconcile observation-based estimates of air–sea CO2 fluxes with those of the changing ocean carbon inventory in order to improve our understanding of the sink, and doing so requires knowledge of how carbon is transported within the interior by the ocean circulation. Here we employ a recently developed optimal tr..