Northern hemisphere CO2 fluxes

Northern hemisphere CO₂ fluxes

The global ocean and terrestrial biosphere of our planet remove approximately half of the presently released anthropogenic carbon dioxide. Without this uptake, the atmospheric CO₂ concentration increase would be even faster with the subsequent consequences to the planets environment. The uncertainty in ocean and terrestrial CO2 sinks are continuously being improved, in order to increase the confidence level in future predictions.

I will present the ongoing activities of the international community to make ocean surface carbon observations, and to estimate the earth’s surface sources and sinks of CO₂ in the northern hemisphere over the last decades, including our uncertainty estimates. This ocean flux, combined with the total surface (land and ocean) fluxes, using atmospheric observations combined with inversion models, gives us an estimate of the terrestrial CO₂ sink by the difference of ocean to total sink.