Research Highlights

Nature Reports Climate Change
Published online: 26 March 2009 | doi:10.1038/climate.2009.30

Carbon calm

Alicia Newton

Geophys. Res. Lett. doi:10.1029/2009GL037553 (in the press)

NASA

It has previously been proposed that an increase in hurricane activity could cause more carbon dioxide to enter the atmosphere from the sea. Hurricane-force winds can drive a rapid local release of the greenhouse gas from surface waters, but new research shows that in the North Atlantic Ocean, at least, such short-term events have no effect on the total amount of CO₂ released each year.

Galen McKinley and colleagues at the University of Wisconsin-Madison used an ocean general circulation model to simulate the chemical response of seawater to hurricane activity in the subtropical North Atlantic from 1992 to 2006. Though the model indicated that there was a local surge of CO₂ release along the hurricane tracks, the amount of CO₂ released from the entire subtropical North Atlantic Ocean during any year was not related to the total number of storms over that hurricane season.

They conclude that the CO₂ stirred up by hurricanes would otherwise have been released, albeit more slowly, through ordinary emissions in the summer and fall.