University of Tasmania, Australia

Ocean storage of CO²

The oceans are a major store of anthropogenic CO². The detection and attribution of how the storage is evolving on decadal scales is critical to understanding the future ocean uptake of CO² and developing accurate models to predict the future storage and acidification. Observed increases in CO² and a decline in dissolved oxygen appear to be occurring throughout most ocean basins. The underlying causes of the changes are expected to be due to a combination of changes in circulation and perhaps biological carbon export to the deep ocean. The project will characterise changes in Southern Ocean water masses and diagnose the drivers of the changes. This is a very significant issue and the linking of oxygen and CO² variability would be done in cooperation with physical oceanographers in Hobart who have been working on temperature and salinity changes detected in the ocean. The primary data to be used are repeat hydrographic sections collected since the 1990's and oxygen equipped autonomous profiling (ARGO) floats.  The project includes opportunities to go to sea to participate in oxygen measurement programs. The project will be co-supervised by Tom Trull from the Institute of Marine and Antarctic Studies at UTAS and Bronte Tilbrook from CSIRO Marine and Atmospheric Research, under the aegis of the ‘Ocean Control of CO²’ research program of the Antarctic Climate and Ecosystems Cooperative Research Centre.