Controls on open-ocean North Atlantic ΔpCO₂ at seasonal and interannual time scales are different

Abstract

The North Atlantic is a substantial sink for anthropogenic CO₂. Understanding the mechanisms driving the sink's variability is key to assessing its current state and predicting its potential response to global climate change. Here we apply a time series decomposition technique to satellite and in situ data to examine separately the factors (both biological and nonbiological) that affect the sea-air CO₂ difference (ΔpCO₂) on seasonal and interannual time scales. We demonstrate that on seasonal time scales, the subpolar North Atlantic ΔpCO₂ signal is predominantly correlated with biological processes, whereas seawater temperature dominates in the subtropics. However, the same factors do not necessarily control ΔpCO₂ on interannual time scales. Our results imply that the mechanisms driving seasonal variability in ΔpCO₂ cannot necessarily be extrapolated to predict how ΔpCO₂, and thus the North Atlantic CO₂ sink, may respond to increases in anthropogenic CO₂ over longer time scales.

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