Measurements of Surface Ocean Carbon Dioxide Partial Pressure During WOCE [WorldCat Entities]

"All of the technical goals of the World Ocean Circulation Experiment (WOCE) field program which were supported under the Department of Energy research grant ''Measurements of Surface Ocean Carbon Dioxide Partial Pressure During WOCE'' (DE-FG03-90ER60981) have been met. This has included the measurement of the partial pressures of carbon dioxide (C0₂) and nitrous oxide (N₂O) in both the surface ocean and the atmosphere on 24 separate shipboard expedition legs of the WOCE Hydrographic Programme. These measurements were made in the Pacific, Indian and Atlantic Oceans over a six-and-a-half year period, and over a distance of nearly 200,000 kilometers of ship track. The total number of measurements, including ocean measurements, air measurements and standard gas measurements, is about 136,000 for each gas, or about 34,000 measurements of each gas in the ocean and in the air. This global survey effort is directed at obtaining a better understanding of the role of the oceans in the global atmospheric budgets of two important natural and anthropogenic modulators of climate through the ''greenhouse effect'', CO₂ and N₂O, and an important natural and anthropogenic modulator of the Earth's protective ozone layer through catalytic processes in the stratosphere, N₂O. For both of these compounds, the oceans play a major role in their global budgets. In the case of CO₂, roughly half of the anthropogenic production through the combustion of fossil fuels has been absorbed by the world's oceans. In the case of N₂O, roughly a third of the natural flux to the atmosphere originates in the oceans. As the interpretation of the variability in the oceanic distributions of these compounds improves, measurements such as those supported by this research project are playing an increasingly important role in improving our understanding of natural and anthropogenic influences on climate and ozone. (B204)."@en