Ben McNeil

Senior Fellow

Climate Change Research Centre

University of New South Wales

Sydney, Australia

Ph: 02 9385 7068

Fax: 02 9385 7123

 

 

Seasonal Carbon Climatology for the Southern Ocean

  • This site contains files of empirically derived Southern Ocean surface carbon fields (DIC, ALK and pCO2) based on the recently published methodology : McNeil, B.I., N. Metzl, R.M. Key, R.J. Matear and A. Corbiere, (2007) An Empirical Estimate of the Southern Ocean air-sea CO2 flux. Global Biogeochemical Cycles, Vol. 21, GB3011, doi:10.1029/2007GB002991, Full Article

  • There are four separate generic txt files available for each season. Headers for each file: Longitude, Latitude, Temperature, Salinity, DIC (umol/kg), ALK (umol/kg) and pCO2(uatm).

  1. Winter (June-Aug) and can be downloaded here

  2. Spring (Sep-Nov) and can be downloaded here

  3. Summer (Dec-Feb) and can be downloaded here

  4. Autumn (Mar-May) and can be downloaded here

  • Each file contains empirically derived DIC (umol/kg), ALK (umol/kg) and pCO2 (uatm) for the surface Southern Ocean (5m depth and south of 40 degrees latitude). DIC and pCO2 fields are corrected to the year 1995 and have the same spatial grid (1 degree by 1 degree) as the 2001 World Ocean Atlas to which the temperature, salinity and nutrient data were used. pCO2 was calculated from DIC/ALK using Mehrbach et al. (1973) dissociation constants refit by Dickson and Millero (1987). A new analysis in our paper showed these dissociation constants to be accurate to within 3.6+/-3uatm.

NB: Feel free to contact me if you have any queries or want to use some specific data.