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Abstract The strength and variability of the Southern Ocean carbon sink is a significant source of uncertainty in the global carbon budget. One barrier to reconciling observations and models is understanding how synoptic weather patterns modulate air-sea carbon exchange. Here, we identify and track storms using atmospheric sea level pressure fields from reanalysis data to assess the role that storms play in driving air-sea CO2exchange. We examine the main drivers of CO2fluxes under storm forcing and quantify their contribution to Southern Ocean annual air-sea CO2fluxes. Our analysis relies on a forced ocean-ice simulation from the Community Earth System Model, as well as CO2fluxes estimated from Biogeochemical Argo floats. We find that extratropical storms in the Southern Hemisphere induce CO2outgassing, driven by CO2disequilibrium. However, this effect is an order of magnitude larger in observations compared to the model and caused by different reasons. Despite large uncertainties in CO2fluxes and storm statistics, observations suggest a pivotal role of storms in driving Southern Ocean air-sea CO2outgassing that remains to be well represented in climate models, and needs to be further investigated in observations.
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This content will become publicly available on July 23, 2026
Uncovering the seasonality of storm-driven Southern Ocean heat and carbon uptake
Abstract The Southern Ocean is an important region for both heat and carbon uptake, due in large part to wind-driven circulation. This region also continually experiences strong winds associated with the passage of synoptic storms, which influence the upper ocean through strong fluxes of momentum, heat, freshwater, and gases. While studies have found that storms can induce strong carbon outgassing, their role in the combined heat and carbon uptake remains unknown. In this work, we explore the climatological impact of storms on the Southern Ocean combined heat and carbon uptake through two preindustrial coupled climate model runs with contrasting seasonal carbon fluxes. We use a feature tracking system to identify storms and create composites for storm-following and post-storm anomalous fluxes of heat and carbon. Storms induce a net anomalous release of heat and carbon from the ocean throughout the year, with clear seasonality in the magnitude of the fluxes that coincide with the background seasonal cycles. We find a strong model dependency for the storm-driven anomalous carbon fluxes, both in terms of the seasonal range and timing of maximum outgassing. Storm-induced anomalous fluxes are dampened on the order of days after the storm passes, with a small continued release of heat that is most persistent in the winter. Our study underlines the high uncertainty about the seasonal nature of storm impacts on the ocean and suggests that evolving atmospheric and oceanic conditions could impose opposing shifts in the future seasonality of storm impacts.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2332379
- PAR ID:
- 10626927
- Publisher / Repository:
- AMS
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Journal of Climate
- ISSN:
- 0894-8755
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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