WHOI PO
Elizabeth Yankovsky, Yale - Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Perspectives on Marine Carbon Dioxide Removal
| Date |
Time |
Location |
| February 11th, 2025 |
3:05pm-4:05pm |
Clark 507 |
Title: Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Perspectives on Marine Carbon Dioxide Removal
Abstract: Limiting global warming requires dramatically reducing CO2 emissions, but also necessitates implementing carbon dioxide removal (CDR) technologies. A promising avenue is marine CDR through ocean alkalinity enhancement (OAE). OAE involves deposition of alkaline substances in the surface ocean, lowering the partial pressure of CO2 , and leading to carbon uptake from the atmosphere. The process of air-sea gas exchange leading to re-equilibration may take years, and is superimposed onto the background ocean dynamics. Here, we consider OAE as a tracer transport problem, and focus on the role of various scales of ocean turbulence in leading to vertical and lateral transport of alkalinity, thus modulating OAE efficiency. We begin by looking at climate model simulations, allowing us to create a global atlas of OAE efficiency across geographic regimes and seasonal variability. We then move to a hierarchy of ROMS configurations simulating OAE deployments off the California coast at three increasingly high resolutions, and spanning the four seasons. Our experiments yield insights into the influences of seasonality, model resolution, and ultimately ocean turbulence on carbon uptake. We find that OAE efficiency is significantly influenced by turbulent flow features such as mesoscale eddies, submesoscale instabilities, and the background seasonal and interannual flow variability characterizing the time and place of interest. This work raises many additional questions on the roles of geophysical turbulence in setting vertical tracer transport and mixing in the context of OAE.