Recent variability of the global ocean carbon sink

Abstract We present a new observation‐based estimate of the global oceanic carbon dioxide (CO 2 ) sink and its temporal variation on a monthly basis from 1998 through 2011 and at a spatial resolution of 1°×1°. This sink estimate rests upon a neural network‐based mapping of global surface ocean observations of the partial pressure of CO 2 ( p CO 2 ) from the Surface Ocean CO 2 Atlas database. The resulting p CO 2 has small biases when evaluated against independent observations in the different ocean basins, but larger randomly distributed differences exist particularly in high latitudes. The seasonal climatology of our neural network‐based product agrees overall well with the Takahashi et al. (2009)…