Prof. Hilary Palevsky co-authors new manuscript on the regional patterns of the biological carbon pump

The article, co-authored by Prof. Palevsky with collaborators at the University of Washington and published this summer in Geophysical Research Letters, synthesizes 85 multiyear geochemical estimates of rates of organic matter export spread across the Pacific and North Atlantic Oceans to provide a new observational-based picture of regional variations in the ocean’s biological carbon pump. The geochemical observations show only modest (three-fold) regional variations in export, whereas satellite‐ and model‐based estimates of export overestimate regional variations by up to twofold and fail to yield observed north‐south trends in export. These findings indicate that more field measurements of export are needed to better test the model‐ and satellite‐based estimates.