Use atmospheric conditions and water properties across three years in the North Pacific and North Atlantic to identify drivers of CO2 flux between the atmosphere and ocean.
Identify periods of time during which the ocean is a source or a sink of CO2 or at equilibrium
Explore patterns in temperature, salinity, wind speed, and chlorophyll concentration data to identify causes of changing CO2 concentration and flux.
Temporal: Assign relative flux magnitudes across time within a site (as driven by seasonal temps, winds, primary production as discovered in #2).
Spatial: Assign relative flux magnitudes as compared between sites (cold west coast currents (and upwelling?) and warm east coast waters as discovered in #2).
This graph shows the partial pressure of CO2 in both the Atmosphere and Ocean. Click the next button to see the resultant CO2 flux across the air-sea interface.
When the site loads, you are able to see the full dataset of pCO2 in air and water from the Oregon Shelf Surface Buoy in the Coastal Endurance Array. As you proceed through the exploration, you will be able to see similar data from the ??? Surface Buoy in the Pioneer Array. You can interact with the data by:
Clicking "next" to reveal annotations and additional data
Turning on and off different oceanic and atmospheric variables to compare their data to the CO2 data
Moving the red slider along the data to help you correlate events between graphs
Zooming in and out of the data to look at different timescales that interest you by changing the width of the highlighted section of the bottom graph (if loads with all the data highlighted)
Questions for Thought
Orientation Questions
What do the units on the axes mean?
What time period does this data cover?
How complete is this dataset? Are there gaps or is it relatively continuous?
Which is greater, the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere or in the water? (Does the answer to this question vary?)
Which is more variable, the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere or in the water?
Where does the concentration of CO2 in the water increase? Decrease?
When comparing sites, which (if any) is more variable?
Interpretation Questions
What is the general relationship between flux direction and atmospheric/oceanic CO2 concentrations?
What patterns can you observe in each individual dataset? How often do these patterns repeat?
What does it mean when water CO2 is rising? How about falling?
Compare patterns in atmospheric and oceanic variables to patterns in water CO2 concentration. Which variables are strongly correlated with CO2? Which ones are weakly correlated? Which ones seem to have no relationship?
What atmospheric and oceanic variables are associated with increases in CO2 concentration in the water?
What atmospheric and oceanic variables are associated with decreases in CO2 concentration in the water?
Where in these graphs is the ocean a source of CO2? Where is it a sink? Comparing between sites and/or across time, where are the greatest source and sink events?
What atmospheric and oceanic variables have the greatest effect on CO2 exchange between air and sea? (I.e., which ones are most important?)
How does the relative importance of these variables vary over time and from place to place?
How can you have a negative CO2 flux without increasing pCO2 in the ocean?
How and why does air-sea flux vary seasonally?
Background Information
Click on the images below to learn more about where and how the dataset above was collected.