Improved air-sea CO<sub>2</sub> flux estimates from sailboat measurements.
Where this comes from
- Record sourced from PubMed, PMID 41512073.
- Also identified by DOI 10.1126/sciadv.adz1502 and PMC identifier 12787523.
- Licence recorded as CC BY.
- The licence permits redistribution, so the abstract is shown in full and the full text is available from the publisher.
Abstract
Despite their importance in the climate system, remote ocean regions and their ability to absorb anthropogenic carbon dioxide (CO<sub>2</sub>) remain highly uncertain. To address this issue, citizen science initiatives, including sailboats, expand the observational network. Using observing system simulations and novel sailboat tracks, we demonstrate how integrating sailboat data improves estimates of ocean carbon uptake. While we underestimate the ocean carbon sink when mimicking real-world sampling, adding available sailboat data does not substantially improve reconstructions. Nevertheless, increased sampling reveals a stronger carbon sink, particularly between 40°S and 60°S. The improvement persists with hypothetical measurement uncertainties, but substantial differences arise depending on whether positive or negative biases are applied to the race track data. While we show that two additional circumnavigations already improve the ocean mean sink estimate, we further highlight the finding that the additional data remain insufficient to correct the overestimated CO<sub>2</sub> sink trend, calling for continuation of the ongoing data collection.