We estimate the
natural and anthropogenic components of the air-sea flux of CO2 in
the Indian Ocean. The increase in atmospheric CO2
driven by human activity has caused the air-sea CO2 flux, to
increase significantly over the industrial era. We estimate the flux in the
year 1780 to be approximately 0.2Gt/yr, increasing by 0.26Gt/yr to 0.5Gt/yr in
2000. The estimate of the natural (preindustrial) flux is highly sensitive to
uncertainties in modern-day CO2 disequilibrium measurements. By
contrast, the estimate of the anthropogenic flux is only weakly sensitive to
these measurements. Our anthropogenic estimate is smaller than other studies
due to the removal in our methodology of the widely made weak-mixing and
constant-disequilibrium assumptions, both of which cause positive bias.
Author: T.M. Hall and F. W. Primeau (thall at giss dot nasa dot gov)
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