| Domain | Oceanic | Description | The oceanic uptake of anthropogenic carbon is a key element of the planetary carbon budget. Over the last 250 years, the ocean has removed about 30% of the CO2 that has been emitted into the atmosphere as a result of the combined actions of fossil-fuel burning and land-use change. Because the net ocean carbon uptake depends on biological as well as chemical activity, the uptake may change as changes occur in oceanic conditions such as alkalinity currents, temperature, surface winds, and biological activity. At present, the community consensus is that the best strategy for monitoring the long-term interior ocean carbon storage is via a global ocean carbon inventory network that measures both dissolved inorganic carbon and alkalinity. With present technology, a major improvement in our knowledge can be achieved with the agreed full-depth repeat survey programme (GO-SHIP; section 5.2.2), also benefiting from the air-sea exchange of CO2 information obtained from the surface ocean pCO2 network. This requires also strong commitments from the participating institutions and nations with fast submission of the data to the data centres in order to facilitate the large-scale synthesis. [GCOS-195 5.4.5] |