Global Ocean acidification - mean sea water pH time series and trend from Multi-Observations Reprocessing

Ocean acidification is quantified by decreases in pH, which is a measure of acidity: a decrease in pH value means an increase in acidity, that is, acidification. The observed decrease in ocean pH resulting from increasing concentrations of CO2 is an important indicator of global change. The estimate of global mean pH builds on a reconstruction methodology, Obtain values for alkalinity based on the so called “locally interpolated alkalinity regression (LIAR)” method after Carter et al., 2016; 2018. Build on surface ocean partial pressure of carbon dioxide (CMEMS product: MULTIOBS_GLO_BIO_CARBON_SURFACE_REP_015_008) obtained from an ensemble of Feed-Forward Neural Networks (Chau et al. 2022) which exploit sampling data gathered in the Surface Ocean CO2 Atlas (SOCAT) ( https://www.socat.info/ ) Derive a gridded field of ocean surface pH based on the van Heuven et al., (2011) CO2 system calculations using reconstructed pCO2 (MULTIOBS_GLO_BIO_CARBON_SURFACE_REP_015_008) and alkalinity. The global mean average of pH at yearly time steps is then calculated from the gridded ocean surface pH field. It is expressed in pH unit on total hydrogen ion scale. In the figure, the amplitude of the uncertainty (1σ ) of yearly mean surface sea water pH varies at a range of (0.0023, 0.0029) pH unit (see Quality Information Document for more details). The trend and uncertainty estimates amount to -0.0017±0.0004e-1 pH units per year. The indicator is derived from in situ observations of CO2 fugacity (SOCAT data base, www.socat.info , Bakker et al., 2016). These observations are still sparse in space and time. Monitoring pH at higher space and time resolutions, as well as in coastal regions will require a denser network of observations and preferably direct pH measurements. A full discussion regarding this OMI can be found in section 2.10 of the Ocean State Report 4 (Gehlen et al., 2020).