Daily to decadal changes: Insights from a high resolution 10-year record of atmospheric carbon dioxide, observed from coastal Antarctica.

The Southern Ocean is the dominant marine sink for anthropogenic carbon, absorbing around 40% of carbon emitted since industrialisation, but it is a remote and challenging region to measure. Sparsity of observational data is the main cause of uncertainty in air-sea carbon flux in the Southern Ocean. Year-round observations of CO₂ mixing ratios can aid understanding of air-sea flux in this critical region and provide valuable insight into how the carbon sink is changing over time as well as its seasonal and interannual variability.

This work presents ten years of high frequency in situ carbon dioxide mixing ratios measured from two coastal Antarctic research stations; Halley, operated by the British Antarctic Survey, and the German research station, Neumayer. This data set provides a rare long-term measurement of CO₂ in the Southern Ocean region, allowing annual growth rates, seasonal changes and interannual variability to be studied. The mean annual growth rate was calculated to be ~2.4 ppm year^-1 between 2013 and 2022.

The coastal location of these stations mean they are ideally placed to explore air-sea CO₂ exchange in the Southern Ocean. Both the Halley and Neumayer records show short-term fluctuations in CO₂ mixing ratios during the summer, with up to ~0.5 ppm decreases in CO₂ over the course of a day, about one fifth of the average annual growth rate. Air mass trajectory analysis carried out using Hysplit with ERA5 meteorological data, suggests that these decreases in CO₂ correspond to periods where the air sampled has spent time over the Southern Ocean, suggesting CO₂ uptake has occurred. This work explores the possible drivers for the short-term variability in CO₂ mixing ratios, focusing on the role of ocean uptake in the summer.