Recalculating the Surface Ocean CO2 Atlas (SOCAT) to a sea surface temperature climate data record.

Ford, D. J., Shutler, J. D., Holding, T., Sims, R. P., Ashton, I., Woolf, D. K., Goddin-Murphy, L., Bakker, D. C. E., Sabine, C., Merchant, C. J. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4687-9850, Embury, O. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1661-7828, Dong, Y. and Wanninkhof, R. (2026) Recalculating the Surface Ocean CO2 Atlas (SOCAT) to a sea surface temperature climate data record. Scientific Data. ISSN 2052-4463 doi: 10.1038/s41597-026-07532-5 (In Press)

Abstract/Summary

The Surface Ocean CO2 Atlas (SOCAT) is a global scientific community effort to collate and provide additional quality control and standardisation for surface ocean carbon dioxide (CO2) data. Each year the international marine carbon community submit any new measurements collected on research vessels, ships of opportunity, moorings, uncrewed surface vehicles and sailing yachts for inclusion in the annual update of the SOCAT database. The data synthesis effort, which published its first data product in 2011, includes a variety of systems, sampling strategies, maintenance cycles and instrument calibrations. Each in-water CO2 gas measurement is paired, and linked, with a sea surface temperature (SST) measurement. However, the differences in measurement systems means that data pairs from different platforms are representative of differing depths in the ocean, whilst SST measurements can suffer from warming within the observation platform. These complexities can limit the accuracy and precision of any atmosphere-ocean CO2 assessments that use the SOCAT products. Here the SOCATv2025 database with an estimated uncertainty in the fugacity of CO2 in seawater (fCO2 (sw)) of less than 5 µatm is recalculated to a reference temperature at a consistent depth of 0.2 m using the European Space Agency (ESA) Climate Change Initiative (CCI) SST climate data record. This recalculation process of the fCO2 values does not assume isochemical conditions and so temperature driven carbonate speciation is captured. The data pairing is maintained so the resulting dataset is well suited for the analysis of atmosphere-ocean CO2 exchange. The synthesis cruise data and gridded data products, that include both the original and recalculated data, are provided and consistency with the original SOCAT data products and format is confirmed. The importance of robustly accounting for the observed warm bias is demonstrated as removing this signal by recalculation to a climate data record temperature shows a ~0.4 Pg C yr−1 (~12%) increase in the 2024 ocean CO2 sink (3.4 Pg C yr−1). These recalculated data products are needed for annual carbon assessments therefore these will be routinely provided each year following each annual SOCAT dataset release.

Item Type	Article
URI	https://centaur.reading.ac.uk/id/eprint/130629
Identification Number/DOI	10.1038/s41597-026-07532-5
Refereed	Yes
Divisions	Science > School of Mathematical, Physical and Computational Sciences > National Centre for Earth Observation (NCEO) Science > School of Mathematical, Physical and Computational Sciences > Department of Meteorology
Publisher	Nature Publishing Group
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