Focus Areas

Ocean Data

Carbon Dioxide In the North Atlantic Ocean

CARINA (CARbon Dioxide In the North Atlantic Ocean), a new global-change program, has been developed to synthesize CO₂ data collected in the North Atlantic for the last 15 years. CARINA was announced by marine scientists from eleven countries who attended the June 1999 workshop, "CO₂ in the North Atlantic" in Delmenhorst, Germany. CDIAC, represented at the workshop by Alexander Kozyr, was named as the primary data center for preservation and distribution of this final international North Atlantic data set. This activity will complement CDIAC's role in PICES (North Pacific Marine Science Organization) working group 13 on CO₂, making CDIAC the leading data center in the world for oceanic CO₂ measurements.

Global Ocean Data Analysis Project

The GLobal Ocean Data Analysis Project (GLODAP) is a cooperative effort of investigators funded for synthesis and modeling projects through NOAA, DOE, and NSF. Cruises conducted as part of the World Ocean Circulation Experiment (WOCE), Joint Global Ocean Flux Study (JGOFS), and NOAA Ocean-Atmosphere Exchange Study (OACES) over the last decade have generated oceanographic data of unparalleled quality and quantity. Most of the data have been reported to national archive facilities but have not been integrated into an internally consistent global data set. GLODAP will compile that data set and examine the global distribution and inventories of oxygen, nutrients, natural and anthropogenic carbon species, natural and bomb-produced radiocarbon (¹⁴C), and ¹³C. These estimates will be used to infer nutrient remineralization ratios (Redfield ratios) and the rate of anthropogenic CO₂, ¹³C, and bomb ¹⁴C uptake in the oceans. These estimates provide an important benchmark against which future observational studies will be compared. They also provide tools for the direct evaluation of numerical ocean carbon models.

Free-Air CO₂ Enrichment

As part of CDIAC's focus on FACE (Free-Air CO₂ Enrichment), the most sophisticated experimental approach to date for studying the effects of elevated CO₂ on vegetation, CDIAC developed and launched a new FACE Web page (http://cdiac.esd.ornl.gov/programs/FACE/face.html) which begins the process of integrating more than thirty FACE sites around the world. This Web site is part of an overall data and information management system being developed for FACE research as a collaborative effort between CDIAC and the FACE group at Brookhaven National Laboratory.