RAGNARoCC

RAGNARoCC was a Large (£2M) NERC funded directed program.

The project’s object is to understand how large, and how variable, are sources and sinks of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere from the North Atlantic. We aim to be able to describe how these have changed in the recent past and how they will change in the future under different climate scenarios. Most effort will be concentrated on carbon dioxide, and we will deliver a comprehensive budgeting of natural and anthropogenic components of the carbon cycle in the North Atlantic and understanding of why the air-sea fluxes of CO2 vary regionally, seasonally and multi-annually. Observations of CH4 and N2O and estimates of their regional fluxes will additionally be made. We, in collaboration with our partner institutions in Europe and the US, will undertake surface measurements of CO2 air-sea fluxes made from networks of voluntary observing ships and at fixed sites. These will be synthesised with observations from hydrographic sections of the interior carbon content. We will thus obtain accurate estimates of the uptake, present storage, and net transport of anthropogenic carbon, and variability in the natural uptake and release of atmospheric CO2 by the N. Atlantic. In parallel with direct estimates made from these observations, forward and inverse models (of both atmospheric and oceanic kinds) of these fluxes will be developed.

ABC is a collaboration between the National Oceanography Centre (NOC), University of Exeter’s Department of Geography, University of Southampton’s School of Ocean and Earth Science, Newcastle University, the University of East Anglia and Plymouth Marine Laboratory (PML).

Within this project we are bringing together observational and modelling (box modelling and CMIP5 analysis) techniques to mechanistically understand recent observed variability.