The Surface Ocean CO2 Atlas (SOCAT), an activity of the international marine carbon research community, provides access to synthesis and gridded fCO(2) (fugacity of carbon dioxide) products for the surface oceans. Version 2 of SOCAT is an update of the previous release (version 1) with more data (increased from 6.3 million to 10.1 million surface water fCO(2) values) and extended data coverage (from 1968-2007 to 1968-2011). The quality control criteria, while identical in both versions, have been applied more strictly in version 2 than in version 1. The SOCAT website (http://www.socat.info/) has links to quality control comments, metadata, individual data set files, and synthesis and gridded data products. Interactive online tools allow visitors to explore the richness of the data. Applications of SOCAT include process studies, quantification of the ocean carbon sink and its spatial, seasonal, year-to-year and longer-term variation, as well as initialisation or validation of ocean carbon models and coupled climate-carbon models.
Biogeochemical cycling in the semi-enclosed Arctic Ocean is strongly influenced by land-ocean transport of carbon and other elements and is vulnerable to environmental and climate changes. Sediments of the Arctic Ocean are an important part of biogeochemical cycling in the Arctic and provide the opportunity to study present and historical input and the fate of organic matter (e.g., through permafrost thawing). Comprehensive sedimentary records are required to compare differences between the Arctic regions and to study Arctic biogeochemical budgets. To this end, the Circum-Arctic Sediment CArbon DatabasE (CASCADE) was established to curate data primarily on concentrations of organic carbon (OC) and OC isotopes (delta C-13, Delta C-14) yet also on total N (TN) as well as terrigenous biomarkers and other sediment geochemical and physical properties. This new database builds on the published literature and earlier unpublished records through an extensive international community collaboration. This paper describes the establishment, structure and current status of CASCADE. The first public version includes OC concentrations in surface sediments at 4244 oceanographic stations including 2317 with TN concentrations, 1555 with delta C-13-OC values and 268 with Delta C-14-OC values and 653 records with quantified terrigenous biomarkers (high-molecular-weight n-alkanes, n-alkanoic acids and lignin phenols). CASCADE also includes data from 326 sediment cores, retrieved by shallow box or multi-coring, deep gravity/piston coring, or sea-bottom drilling. The comprehensive dataset reveals large-scale features of both OC content and OC sources between the shelf sea recipients. This offers insight into release of pre-aged terrigenous OC to the East Siberian Arctic shelf and younger terrigenous OC to the Kara Sea. Circum-Arctic sediments thereby reveal patterns of terrestrial OC remobilization and provide clues about thawing of permafrost. CASCADE enables synoptic analysis of OC in Arctic Ocean sediments and facilitates a wide array of future empirical and modeling studies of the Arctic carbon cycle. The database is openly and freely available online (https://doi.org/10.17043/cascade; Martens et al., 2021), is provided in various machine-readable data formats (data tables, GIS shapefile, GIS raster), and also provides ways for contributing data for future CASCADE versions. We will continuously update CASCADE with newly published and contributed data over the foreseeable future as part of the database management of the Bolin Centre for Climate Research at Stockholm University.
Soils in the northern high latitudes are a key component in the global carbon cycle; the northern permafrost region covers 22 % of the Northern Hemisphere land surface area and holds almost twice as much carbon as the atmosphere. Permafrost soil organic matter stocks represent an enormous long-term carbon sink which is in risk of switching to a net source in the future. Detailed knowledge about the quantity and the mechanisms controlling organic carbon storage is of utmost importance for our understanding of potential impacts of and feedbacks on climate change. Here we present a geospatial dataset of physical and chemical soil properties calculated from 651 soil pedons encompassing more than 6500 samples from 16 different study areas across the northern permafrost region. The aim of our dataset is to provide a basis to describe spatial patterns in soil properties, including quantifying carbon and nitrogen stocks. There is a particular need for spatially distributed datasets of soil properties, including vertical and horizontal distribution patterns, for modeling at local, regional, or global scales. This paper presents this dataset, describes in detail soil sampling; laboratory analysis, and derived soil geochemical parameters; calculations; and data clustering. Moreover, we use this dataset to estimate soil organic carbon and total nitrogen storage estimates in soils in the northern circumpolar permafrost region (17.9×106 km2) using the European Space Agency's (ESA's) Climate Change Initiative (CCI) global land cover dataset at 300 m pixel resolution. We estimate organic carbon and total nitrogen stocks on a circumpolar scale (excluding Tibet) for the 0–100 and 0–300 cm soil depth to be 380 and 813 Pg for carbon, and 21 and 55 Pg for nitrogen, respectively. Our organic carbon estimates agree with previous studies, with most recent estimates of 1000 Pg (−170 to +186 Pg) to 300 cm depth. Two separate datasets are freely available on the Bolin Centre Database repository (https://doi.org/10.17043/palmtag-2022-pedon-1, Palmtag et al., 2022a; and https://doi.org/10.17043/palmtag-2022-spatial-1, Palmtag et al., 2002b).