ESSIC Scientist Liqing Jiang is a co-author on a new paper published in Oceanography that reports the rapid changes in ocean chemistry from global ocean observations over recent decades, highlighting the effects of anthropogenic carbon dioxide absorption.
The study, titled “Acidification of the Global Surface Ocean: What We Have Learned from Observations”, provides a high-resolution, regionally varying view of global surface ocean carbon dioxide fugacity, carbonate ion content, total hydrogen ion content, pH on total scale, and aragonite and calcite saturation states on selected time intervals from 1961 to 2020. It discusses the major roles played by air-sea anthropogenic CO2 uptake, warming, local upwelling processes, and declining buffer capacity in controlling the spatial and temporal variability of these parameters. These changes are occurring rapidly in regions that would normally be considered ocean acidification refugia, thus threatening the protection that these regions provide for stocks of sensitive species and increasing the potential for expanding biological impacts.
Jiang is a chemical oceanographer specializing in the study of inorganic carbon cycling and ocean acidification in the global oceans. He received his Ph.D in Marine Sciences from the University of Georgia in 2009 and did his postdoctoral research at Yale University. Jiang has been working at NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) since 2011. Currently, he serves as the lead of the Ocean Carbon and Acidification Data System (OCADS), which is co-funded by NOAA’s Ocean Acidification Program, Global Ocean Monitoring and Observing Program, and NCEI. In addition to data management, Jiang spends a lot of his time on data synthesis efforts.
To access the paper, click here: “Acidification of the Global Surface Ocean: What We Have Learned from Observations”.
