GLODAP Carbon Synthesis Project

The GLobal Ocean Data Analysis Project (GLODAP) is a cooperative effort to coordinate global synthesis projects funded through the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), and the National Science Foundation (NSF) as part of the Joint Global Ocean Flux Study - Synthesis and Modeling Project (JGOFS-SMP). Cruises conducted as part of the World Ocean Circulation Experiment (WOCE), JGOFS, and the NOAA Ocean-Atmosphere Exchange Study (OACES) over the decade of the 1990s have created an oceanographic database of unparalleled quality and quantity. These data provide an important asset to the scientific community investigating carbon cycling in the oceans. The central objective of this project is to generate a unified data set to help determine the global distributions of both natural and anthropogenic inorganic carbon, including radiocarbon. These estimates provide an important benchmark against which future observational studies will be compared. They also provide tools for the direct evaluation of numerical ocean carbon models.