Ocean Surface CO₂ Flux with Surface Winds

There are no direct global-scale observations of carbon fluxes between the land and oceans and the overlying atmosphere. Understanding the carbon cycle requires estimates of these fluxes, which can be computed indirectly using models constrained with global space-based observations that provide information about the physical and biological state of the land, atmosphere, and ocean. This animation shows results from the ECCO-Darwin ocean biogeochemistry model, which was developed as part of the NASA Carbon Monitoring System (CMS) Flux Project. The objective of the CMS-Flux project is to attribute changes in atmospheric accumulation of carbon dioxide to spatially-resolved fluxes by utilizing the full suite of NASA data, models, and assimilation capabilities.

ECCO-Darwin is based on a data-constrained, global-ocean, and sea-ice simulation provided by the Estimating the Circulation and Climate of the Ocean (ECCO) Project and an ocean ecosystem component provided by the Darwin Project. Together, ECCO and Darwin provide a time-evolving physical and biological environment for carbon biogeochemistry, which is used to compute surface fluxes of carbon at high spatial and temporal resolution. A more complete description of ECCO-Darwin is available in this StoryMap.

The animation shows air-sea CO₂ flux and surface-ocean winds from 3 Jan 2012 to 15 Aug 2012. Blue colors indicate CO₂ uptake and red colors indicate outgassing of CO₂ by the ocean ranging from -5 to 5 mol C/m2/year. The pathlines indicate surface winds, which is one of the drivers of air-sea CO₂ exchange.