The Southern Ocean is an important part of the carbon cycle, responsible for a significant fraction of the oceanic uptake of anthropogenic carbon and for the export of nutrients in mode waters that fuel productivity in much of the rest of the ocean. It also the location of a large number of Argo oxygen floats deployed over the past two decades.
High quality, air-calibrated biogeochemical floats have been deployed as part of the Southern Ocean Carbon and Climate Observations and Modeling project (SOCCOM) and a recent reanalysis of Argo oxygen data by Drucker and Riser (2016) have yielded an unparalleled opportunity to understand the linkage between seasonal oxygen changes and the carbon cycle.
In a recently published study (Bushinsky et al., 2017), we analyzed 9 years of Argo oxygen data to directly calculate air-sea oxygen fluxes over the entire Southern Ocean for the first time. We found an oxygen uptake double that of prior estimates (Gruber et al., 2001; Resplandy et al., 2015), primarily driven by ventilation in the southernmost regions of the Southern Ocean. Our current work involves understanding how these fluxes relate to newly estimated carbon fluxes also derived from SOCCOM Argo floats.