Since 1993, regular seasonal water sampling has been conducted along a
ship-track between Island and Newfoundland in the
open ocean of the North Atlantic subpolar gyre in the
frame of the long-term SURATLANT program. In this study, we
analyse the interannual variation of the carbon dioxide system, including
seawater fugacity (fCO2)
and air-sea CO2 fluxes for the period 1993-2004. During
1993-1997, the data present a clear seasonality in this region marked by a
strong CO2 sink in summer and near-equilibrium in winter. For recent
years, 2001-2004, we observed a dramatic change of the source/sink seasonality.
An extreme case was observed in 2003 when oceanic fCO2 was above equilibrium during all
seasons. This strong anomaly was driven by ocean warming.
Author: A. Corbière, N. Metzl, G. Reverdin , C. Brunet , et al (metzl at ccr dot jussieu dot fr)
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