Extratropical storms induce carbon outgassing over the Southern Ocean

The strength and variability of the Southern Ocean carbon sink is a significant source of uncertainty in the global carbon budget. One barrier to reconciling observations and models is understanding how synoptic weather patterns modulate air–sea carbon exchange. Here, we identify and track storms using atmospheric sea level pressure fields from reanalysis data to assess the role that storms play in driving air–sea CO2 exchange. We examine the main drivers of CO2 fluxes under storm forcing and quantify their contribution to Southern Ocean annual air–sea CO2 fluxes. Our analysis relies on a forced ocean–ice simulation from the Community Earth System Model, as well as CO2 fluxes estimated from Biogeochemical Argo floats. We find that extratropical storms in the Southern Hemisphere induce CO2 outgassing, driven by CO2 disequilibrium. However, this effect is an order of magnitude larger in observations compared to the model and caused by different reasons. Despite large uncertainties in CO2 fluxes and storm statistics, observations suggest a pivotal role of storms in driving Southern Ocean air–sea CO2 outgassing that remains to be well represented in climate models, and needs to be further investigated in observations.