A major goal of international ocean carbon research is to determine regional fluxes on seasonal timescales to assess the magnitude and changes in atmospheric CO 2 uptake by the ocean. This effort requires sustained observations of surface pCO 2 as well as a means to interpolate the observations in time and space. A pilot study was initiated in the Caribbean Sea to investigate an approach to reach this goal. From a combination of weekly shipboard measurements of surface water pCO 2 and remotely

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... ensed parameters, weekly flux maps have been created for the Caribbean Sea for the past three years. The pCO 2 measurements were performed on the cruise ship Explorer of the Seas operated by the Royal Caribbean Cruise lines who have installed an oceanographic laboratory on this ship. For each year a correlation between pCO2 and SST is established using temperature data from the thermosalinograph located near the seawater intake on the ship. This relationship is then combined with the regional 1 by 1 ˚ weekly temperature data assimilated using in situ observations and AVHRR temperature data [Reynolds, 2002] to create weekly pCO 2 fields. These pCO 2 fields are combined with wind speeds from the SeaWinds sensor on QuikSCAT to estimate the weekly regional fluxes. The data from 2002 and procedures are detailed in Olsen et al. [2004]. Here we augment these results with observations from 2003 and 2004 and discuss the differences between the years. The algorithms between pCO 2 and SST are very similar for the 3 years and regional pCO 2 fields showed little difference except for local anomalies caused by episodic changes such as passage of hurricanes. Fluxes show greater interannual variability due to changes in wind speeds. REFERENCES Olsen, A., J. Triñanes, and R. Wanninkhof, Sea-air flux of CO2 in the Caribbean Sea estimated using in situ and remote sensing data.