Diagnosing the Influence of Southern Ocean Storms on Air‐Sea Carbon Dioxide Flux From Synthetic Floats: A Modeling Study | CU Experts

Abstract; The Southern Ocean is the stormiest place on Earth, but sparse observations challenge our ability to understand the influence of storms on air‐sea fluxes. Here we quantify storm‐driven Southern Ocean fluxes using synthetic floats that mimic real‐world platforms in a physical‐biogeochemical simulation of the Energy Exascale Earth System Model between 2014 and 2023. By subsampling our array at the same resolution as real‐world arrays, we diagnose the capability of current observations in capturing fluxes in storms. We find that storms induce anomalous outgassing, with an average flux anomaly of 0.87 mmol C . However, when the synthetic float array is reduced to match observations, storm‐driven fluxes cannot be fully captured. The magnitude and spatial pattern of fluxes within storms are dominated by wind speed and atmospheric pressure, suggesting that knowledge of high‐resolution atmospheric fields are required to resolve storm impacts on fluxes.

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