ORCID

0000-0003-3392-0316 (Turner)

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2025

DOI

10.1029/2024GL112446

Publication Title

Geophysical Research Letters

Volume

52

Issue

4

Pages

e2024GL112446 (1-11)

Abstract

The Southern Ocean plays a vital role in global CO₂ uptake, but the magnitude and even the sign of the flux remain uncertain, and the influence of phytoplankton phenology is underexplored. This study focuses on the West Antarctic Peninsula, a region experiencing rapid climate change, to examine shifts in seasonal carbon uptake. Using 20 years of in situ air-sea CO₂ flux and satellite-derived Chlorophyll-a, we observe that the seasonal cycles of both air-sea CO₂ flux and Chlorophyll-a intensify poleward. The amplitude of the seasonal cycle of the non-thermal component of surface ocean pCO₂ increases with increasing latitude, while the amplitude of the thermal component remains relatively stable. Pronounced biological uptake occurs over the shelf in austral summer despite reduced CO₂ solubility in warmer waters, which typically limits carbon uptake through physical processes. These findings underscore the prominence of biological mechanisms in regulating carbon fluxes in this rapidly changing region.

Rights

© 2025. The Authors.

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Data Availability

Article states: "Ocean color data used in satellite-derived Chl-a analysis are available from the Ocean Colour Climate Change Initiative (OC-CCI) (Sathyendranath et al., 2019) and are accessible at https://www.oceancolour.org/thredds/catalog-cci.html?dataset=CCI_ALL-v6.0-MONTHLY. Surface ocean pCO₂ data are available from the Surface Ocean CO₂ Atlas (SOCAT) v2023 (Bakker et al., 2016) and are accessible at https://socat.info/index.php/data-access/. For this study SOCAT V2023 was used which is available at https://socat.info/index.php/previous-versions/. pCO₂atm is the dry air mixing ratio of atmospheric CO₂ (xCO₂) from the Global Monitoring Laboratory surface marine boundary layer CO₂ product available at https://gml.noaa.gov/ccgg/mbl/mbl.html (last access: 19 November 2024) (Lan et al., 2023). Code to make figures in this paper is available at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.14608738 (Turner, 2025)."

Original Publication Citation

Turner, J. S., Munro, D. R., Fay, A., Stammerjohn, S., Kim, H., Schofield, O., & Dierssen, H. (2025). Seasonal variability of surface ocean carbon uptake and chlorophyll-a concentration in the West Antarctic Peninsula over two decades. Geophysical Research Letters, 52(4), 1-11, Article e2024GL112446. https://doi.org/10.1029/2024GL112446

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