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Ocean Interior constraints on air-sea fluxes of oxygen and APO: An update. Sara Mikaloff Fletcher & Nicolas Gruber Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences & IGPP, UCLA. Thanks to Andy Jacobson, Princeton.
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Ocean Interior constraints on air-sea fluxes of oxygen and APO: An update Sara Mikaloff Fletcher & Nicolas Gruber Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences & IGPP, UCLA Thanks to Andy Jacobson, Princeton
Note relatively small sensitivity of APO to large model-model differences in ocean transport in the extra-tropics Results from Gruber et al. (2001)
OCEAN REGIONS AND O2* DATA
SUMMARY • New 27 region inversions appear to give robust estimates of the air-sea exchange of oxygen with little sensitivity to model transport. • Comparison of the modeled APO distribution with observations gives better agreement than before, particularly in the tropics. However, most of the improvement is a result of using a different atmospheric transport model (TM3 instead of GCTM.) • Discrepancies continue to exist in the high-latitude Southern hemisphere. We suspect that this is due to ocean model errors.
DISCUSSION POINTS • The power of APO to constrain annual mean air-sea fluxes of oxygen is limited, as uncertainties in atmospheric transport and in the other components of APO are likely overwhelming the problem. • It appears to be more fruitful to use APO as a consistency check for ocean-based estimates of air-sea fluxes of oxygen. • There appears to be interesting potential to use APO to evaluate atmospheric transport models, e.g. in their representation of oceanic boundary layers, or in the transport of oceanic air over the continents, as proposed earlier.
