– Through the IIM (Vigo) and using artificial intelligence techniques.
– Both variables are related to the carbon cycle and therefore to the effects of climate change.
Santiago de Compostela, 8 October 2020. The Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) has generated global monthly climatologies of dissolved inorganic carbon and alkalinity in the ocean to provide an overview of the state of the sea over the last five decades with regard to both variables, which are directly related to the carbon cycle and therefore to climate change.
This line of work is being developed in the Oceanology group at the Institute of Marine Research (IIM, Vigo) and forms part of the doctoral thesis being carried out by Daniel Broullón Durán under the supervision of research professor Fiz F. Pérez and Rosa Reboreda. The main objective of the thesis is to contribute to a robust understanding of the variability of the CO2 system in seawater, both at oceanic and coastal levels, using artificial intelligence techniques and ocean circulation and biogeochemical models. The aim is to help produce more accurate predictions on the advance of climate change and its major consequence for ocean organisms: ocean acidification.
The results obtained in this line of work are being disseminated through publication in high-impact scientific journals such as Earth System Science Data.
“Anthropogenic CO2 emissions into the atmosphere have modified the carbon cycle for more than two centuries. Since the ocean stores most inorganic carbon and absorbs CO2, it is important to unravel the natural and anthropogenic processes that drive the carbon cycle at different spatial and temporal scales. This is where climatologies emerge, as they provide a solid basis for modelling the carbon cycle and for assessing impacts on marine organisms,” says Daniel Broullón.
“The climatologies generated arise from combining artificial intelligence techniques applied to a huge number of oceanographic measurements collected around the planet since the 1970s. This makes it possible to cover the entire ocean and obtain a global view of the CO2 system in seawater. Within the line of research developed by the group on CO2 in the ocean, two variables related to the carbon cycle were selected: alkalinity, associated with the ocean’s capacity to buffer changes in seawater pH, and dissolved inorganic carbon, which accounts for the concentration of inorganic carbon species,” explains Daniel Broullón, adding that “the whole ocean, from the surface to a depth of 5,500 metres, was selected as the analysis area in order to obtain a complete representation of the state of the CO2 system over the last five decades”.
“The results reveal broad variability in the CO2 system in coastal zones, the equatorial region and polar latitudes, reflecting the greater stress to which organisms in those areas are subjected. Their main usefulness lies in the fact that they can be introduced into models to predict ocean conditions in the coming years, unravel the processes controlling carbon-cycle variability and assess the ocean’s capacity to absorb the CO2 emitted by humans into the atmosphere and, consequently, the future of marine life,” Daniel Broullón highlights.
To generate the climatologies for the two variables, the research team used artificial intelligence techniques, specifically neural networks, because of their ability to extract complex relationships between different oceanographic variables.
In addition to the scientific articles published, the climatologies generated in this study are available in Digital CSIC, the institution’s data repository.
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