NASA ISLSCP II Project: Global Ocean CO2 Flux and Atmospheric Consumption Grids

Approximately one million measurements from 1956-1959 onward form the basis for this climatological data. It contains gridded estimates of net ocean-air CO2 flux, sea-air pCO2 difference, and continental atmospheric CO2 consumption by rock weathering. The data is corrected to a 1995 reference year and is provided under a CC-BY-4.0 license.

Use Cases

• Modeling global carbon budgets based on gridded ocean-air CO2 flux data.
• Analyzing spatial patterns of atmospheric CO2 consumption by continental weathering.
• Studying climatological ocean pCO2 distributions under non-El Nino conditions.
• Validating Earth system model outputs against corrected historical pCO2 measurements.

Strengths

• Based on approximately one million direct pCO2 measurements from the global ocean.
• Data is corrected to a consistent 1995 reference year using atmospheric CO2 concentration records.
• Includes multiple carbon flux components (ocean-air and atmospheric consumption) on a consistent 0.5-degree grid.

Limitations

• Row count and dataset size are unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.
• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Last update date is unknown; freshness unverified.

Provenance

Source

NASA ISLSCP II Project, hosted on aws_open_data.

Collection Method

Calculated from direct gas-seawater equilibration measurements, corrected using atmospheric CO2 data from GLOBALVIEW-CO2 and Mauna Loa records.

Time Range

Measurements from 1956-1959 onward, corrected to 1995.

Freshness

null

Geography

Global ocean and continental areas.