Biogeosciences www.biogeosciences.net 1726-4170 1726-4189 6 3 2009 10.5194/bg-6-375-2009 http://www.biogeosciences.net/6/375/2009/ http://www.biogeosciences.net/6/375/2009/bg-6-375-2009.html http://www.biogeosciences.net/6/375/2009/bg-6-375-2009.pdf 375 390 2009-03-16 The role of ocean transport in the uptake of anthropogenic CO₂ L. Cao longcao@stanford.edu M. Eby A. Ridgwell K. Caldeira D. Archer A. Ishida F. Joos K. Matsumoto U. Mikolajewicz A. Mouchet J. C. Orr G.-K. Plattner R. Schlitzer K. Tokos I. Totterdell T. Tschumi Y. Yamanaka A. Yool Department of Global Ecology, Carnegie Institution, Stanford, California, USA School of Earth and Ocean Sciences, University of Victoria, Victoria, British Columbia, Canada School of Geographical Sciences, University of Bristol, Bristol, UK Department of the Geophysical Sciences, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA Frontier Research Center for Global Change, Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology, Yokohama, Japan Climate and Environmental Physics, Physics Institute and Oeschger Centre for Climate Change Research, University of Bern, Bern, Switzerland Department of Geology and Geophysics, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, USA Max Planck Institute for Meteorology, Bundesstrasse 53, 20146 Hamburg, Germany Department of Astrophysics, Geophysics and Oceanography, University of Liege, Liege, Belgium Marine Environment Laboratories, International Atomic Energy Agency, Monaco Alfred Wegener Institute, Bremerhaven, Germany National Oceanography Centre, Southampton, UK Graduate School of Environmental Earth Science, Hokkaido University, Sapporo, Japan Institute of Biogeochemistry and Pollutant Dynamics, ETH Zürich, Universitätstr., Zürich, Switzerland Met Office Hadley Centre, Exeter, UK We compare modeled oceanic carbon uptake in response to pulse CO₂ emissions using a suite of global ocean models and Earth system models. In response to a CO₂ pulse emission of 590 Pg C (corresponding to an instantaneous doubling of atmospheric CO₂ from 278 to 556 ppm), the fraction of CO₂ emitted that is absorbed by the ocean is: 37±8%, 56±10%, and 81±4% (model mean ±2σ ) in year 30, 100, and 1000 after the emission pulse, respectively. Modeled oceanic uptake of pulse CO₂ on timescales from decades to about a century is strongly correlated with simulated present-day uptake of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) and CO₂ across all models, while the amount of pulse CO₂ absorbed by the ocean from a century to a millennium is strongly correlated with modeled radiocarbon in the deep Southern and Pacific Ocean. However, restricting the analysis to models that are capable of reproducing observations within uncertainty, the correlation is generally much weaker. 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