Grant: Advancing Climate Change Science in Canada

The ocean absorbs about one third of the carbon dioxide produced by human activities, resulting insubstantially lower atmospheric carbon dioxide levels and slower rates of climate change. However, the ocean'scarbon absorption rate is vulnerable to climate change and is likely to decrease in the future. Despite itsimportance and vulnerability, the rate at which the ocean absorbs carbon is surprisingly poorly known,especially how variable it may be on smaller regional scales. Canada has been investing significantly in newtechnologies to observe the ocean and in expanded numerical modelling resources. Our proposed MarineCarbon Sink project seeks to capitalize on these investments by developing techniques to transform newobservations of marine carbon into reliable estimates of the ocean's carbon absorption rate. This will involvecalibrating and quality controlling the observations, determining air-sea fluxes from the observations,quantifying the impact of biological processes on carbon, and integrating different measurements into a singleregional average. Our project also seeks to improve predictions from numerical computer models. This willinvolve determining the strengths and weaknesses of different models, quantifying the extent to whichobserved changes are driven by long-term climate change as opposed to natural variability, and establishingwhich marine processes need to be included in models to obtain the most accurate predictions of future oceancarbon absorption. We will accomplish these objectives by forming a network of students and a postdoctoralresearcher with academic and government scientists across Canada to advance our understanding of carbondynamics in Canada's three ocean regions and to develop integrated observational/modelling techniques toquantify and predict the ocean's natural role as an important carbon sink.