The future trajectory of this uptake will determine the intensity and cost of these actions and hence obtaining accurate and up to date estimates of ocean C uptake is important for the production of high quality information products such as the Global C Budget produced annually for the COP.
We know that Ocean C uptake varies widely in space and time and hence large quantities of high quality information is required to track this uptake. In Europe this is provided by the Ocean component of ICOS, the Integrated Carbon Observing System, which consists of multiple ocean stations. These are on research and merchant vessels and on moorings that measure surface CO2 concentrations and which then report these data to international databases such as SOCAT.
The ICOS Ocean Thematic Centre supports this effort by advocating for its ongoing funding within fora such as the WMO, by providing standards, training and software solutions and by auditing station operations and data quality (a process known in ICOS as labelling).
In this session we will describe our basic operations and solicit feedback in order to improve the services we offer European Surface Ocean C observing, with a particular emphasis on the likely future operation of the WMO Global Greenhouse Gas Watch programme (G3W).
We plan a mixture of short talks, panel discussions and questions from the floor and anticipate a lively and vigorous discussion.
We anticipate interest from
i) Groups already involved in ICOS who can offer perspectives on our current operational model
ii) Potential new members of ICOS interested in finding out how we can support them
iii) Groups interested in how we can contribute to the MRV of Ocean CDR efforts"