Abstract:

This paper summarizes the importance of air-sea CO2 fluxes assessment in the Southern Ocean for understanding of global carbon cycle and the limitation of in situ measurements in polar regions for such purpose.A method is introduced to calculate air-sea CO2 fluxes in the Southern Ocean using satellite data by referring to the previous achievements on the air-sea CO2 fluxes estimation in the open ocean and taking advantage of the data collected during the past twenty years in Chinese National Antarctic Research Expeditions.Air-sea CO2 flux estimates are based on the empirical relationships derived from sea surface CO2 partial pressure(pCO2) and relative controlling factors.And pCO2 fields are then created by optimum interpolations based on satellite data and compared with in situ investigations.