Upgraded toolbox for air-sea gas flux analyses

Accurate calculations of air-sea fluxes of climate critical gases are essential for us to monitor the health of our oceans and changes to our climate. Monitoring of air-sea gas exchange, by programmes such as AMT4OceanSatFlux, can be complemented by FluxEngine, a standardised tool which can robustly calculate air-sea gas fluxes from their data. The toolbox is now being used by in situ, Earth observation and modelling scientific communities throughout the world and is utilized by AMT4OceanSatFlux scientists to create global estimates of CO₂ flux.

A recent paper, co-authored by AMT4OceanSatFlux scientists, describes the advances in the software. The key new features include:

1. Easier installation: FluxEngine has been optimised for use on a standalone desktop or laptop computer, removing the previous requirements for specialist computing facilities.
2. Flexible data input: new developments allow more flexible formatting of the input data with optional pre-processing functions.
3. Extensive support for in situ data.
4. Custom gas transfer velocity parameterisation.
5. Extensions for other sparingly soluble gases, nitrous oxide and methane.

The upgraded software is now able to address a much broader range of research questions. The paper illustrates this with four case studies highlighting the key developments and extended capabilities of the new version. Two of the case studies use extensive data collected on AMT cruises - calculating sea to air CO₂ gas flux from research cruise data and surfactant suppression of sea to air nitrous oxide fluxes.

Developments in the software have resulted in improved calculations of air-sea gas exchange which are central to our understanding of how the oceans regulate increasing levels of carbon dioxide.

FluxEngine will continue to be updated as new approaches become available, the software is open source and available on a creative commons license via http://github.com/oceanflux-ghg/FluxEngine