New method developed to combine data on ocean carbonate system

A new methodology has been developed to group in situ marine carbonate system data, providing a tool for matching in situ data with satellite, model and climatological data, which often have different spatiotemporal scales. This has resulted in a global matchup dataset consisting of over 35 million in situ data points spanning 54 years, providing users with a large multi-parameter carbonate system dataset in a consistent, collated, and standardised format suitable for model-data intercomparisons and evaluations. The matchup dataset can be updated as new data becomes available, and similar datasets can be constructed for regional studies.

This approach for assessing datasets or developing new algorithms overcomes the shortfalls of standard approaches as the in situ, model and satellite data are now all treated consistently and equally in time and space.

These data and this approach will form the basis for the uncertainty analysis of all of the Ocean Health OA data products. So now that the benefits of the approach are clear, and its functionality has been shown to work, we are now working on a higher temporal and spatial resolution version for assessing our next generation of data outputs.

This work (Land et al., 2023) is now published.

Figure 1 Statistics of pCO2w in each ROI over the whole database (272 753 ROIs). (a) ROI mean, (b) ROI standard deviation and (c) number of measurements in each ROI.

Reference

Land, P. E., Findlay, H. S., Shutler, J. D., Piolle, J.-F., Sims, R., Green, H., Kitidis, V., Polukhin, A., and Pipko, I. I.: OceanSODA-MDB: a standardised surface ocean carbonate system dataset for model–data intercomparisons, Earth Syst. Sci. Data, 15, 921–947, https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-15-921-2023, 2023.