The FluxEngine air-sea gas flux toolbox: simplified interface and extensions for in situ analyses and multiple sparingly soluble gases
Thomas Holding, Ian G. Ashton, Jamie D. Shutler, Peter E. Land, Philip D. Nightingale, Andrew P. Rees, Ian Brown, Jean-Francois Piolle, Annette Kock, Hermann W. Bange, David K. Woolf, Lonneke Goddijn-Murphy
(+7 others)
2019
Ocean Science Discussions
<p><strong>Abstract.</strong> The flow (flux) of climate critical gases, such as carbon dioxide (CO<sub>2</sub>), between the ocean and the atmosphere is a fundamental component of our climate and the biogeochemical development of the oceans. Therefore, the accurate calculation of these air-sea gas fluxes is critical if we are to monitor the health of our oceans and changes to our climate. FluxEngine is an open source software toolbox that allows users to easily perform calculations of air-sea
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... as fluxes from model, <i>in-situ</i> and Earth observation data. The original development and verification of the toolbox was described in a previous publication and the toolbox is already being used by scientists across multiple disciplines. The toolbox has now been considerably updated to allow its use as a Python library, to enable simplified installation, verification of its installation, to enable the handling of multiple sparingly soluble gases and greatly expanded functionality for supporting <i>in situ</i> dataset analyses. This new functionality for supporting <i>in situ</i> analyses includes user defined grids, time periods and projections, the ability to re-analyse <i>in situ</i> CO<sub>2</sub> data to a common temperature dataset and the ability to easily calculate gas fluxes using <i>in situ</i> data from drifting buoys, fixed moorings and research cruises. Here we describe these new capabilities and then demonstrate their application through illustrative case studies. The first case study demonstrates the workflow for accurately calculating CO<sub>2</sub> fluxes using <i>in situ</i> data from four research cruises from the Surface Ocean CO<sub>2</sub> Atlas (SOCAT) database. The second case study shows that reanalysing an eight month time series of pCO<sub>2</sub> data collected from a fixed station in the Baltic Sea can remove errors equal to 35&thinsp;% of the net air-sea gas flux. The third case study demonstrates that biological surfactants could supress individual nitrous oxide sea-air gas fluxes by up to 13&thinsp;%. The final case study illustrates how a dissipation-based gas transfer parameterisation can be implemented and used. The updated version of the toolbox (version 3) and all documentation is now freely available.</p>
doi:10.5194/os-2019-45
fatcat:5xpwommgrrfgnggodvimchr6yi
