Calculating long-term global air-sea flux of carbon dioxide using scatterometer, passive microwave, and model reanalysis wind data

Fangohr, Susanne, Woolf, David K., Jefferey, Christopher D. and Robinson, Ian S. (2008) Calculating long-term global air-sea flux of carbon dioxide using scatterometer, passive microwave, and model reanalysis wind data. Journal of Geophysical Research, 113 (C09032). (doi:10.1029/2005JC003376).

Abstract

Global air-sea flux of carbon dioxide (CO2) is calculated from wind data acquired by the satellite scatterometer QuikSCAT, the passive microwave radiometer AMSR-E, and the model re-analysis ERA-40 using four of the most commonly used wind-speed dependent parameterizations of gas transfer velocity.

The results are compared to obtain an estimate of that uncertainty in the flux calculations which results solely from the origin of the input wind data. We illustrate the discrepancies between these data sets and quantify the uncertainty in the computed air-sea CO2 flux that arises from data processing such as temporal and spatial averaging using AMSR-E as an example data set.

The impact of temporal variability of wind speed is shown to be significantly greater than that of spatial variability. However, simple parameterizations of temporal variability are found to be sensor-specific and cannot be applied in a straightforward way to datasets with lower temporal resolutions from other sensors.

We show a simple methodology to correct monthly mean data in such a way that parameterizations of temporal variability derived from QuikSCAT data can be applied to data from AMSR-E and ERA-40. This allows us to produce a global 44-year time series of gas transfer velocity and to present a more coherent estimate of air-sea transfer of carbon dioxide from the three most commonly available types of wind data.

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