https://doi.org/10.5194/bg-2020-339 Preprint. Discussion started: 28 September 2020 c Author(s) 2020. CC BY 4.0 License. Nordic Seas Acidification Filippa Fransner1, Friederike Fröb2, Jerry Tjiputra3, Melissa Chierici4, Agneta Fransson5, Emil Jeansson3, Truls Johannessen1, Elizabeth Jones4, Siv K. Lauvset3, Sólveig R. Ólafsdóttir6, Abdirahman Omar3, Ingunn Skjelvan3, and Are Olsen1 1Geophysical Institute, University of Bergen, and Bjerknes Centre for Climate Research, Bergen, Norway 2Max Planck Institute for Meteorology, Hamburg, Germany 3NORCE Norwegian Research Centre, Bjerknes Centre for Climate Research, Bergen, Norway 4Institute of Marine Research, Fram Centre, Tromsø, Norway 5 Norwegian Polar Institute, Tromsø, Norway 6Marine and Freshwater Research Institute, Reykjavík, Iceland Correspondence: Filippa Fransner (fi
[email protected]) Abstract. Being windows to the deep ocean, the Nordic Seas play an important role in transferring anthropogenic carbon, and thus ocean acidification, to the abyss. Due to its location in high latitudes, it is further more sensitive to acidification compared with many other oceanic regions. Here we make a detailed investigation of the acidification of the Nordic Seas, and its drivers, since pre-Industrial to 2100 by using in situ measurements, gridded climatological data, and simulations from one Earth System 5 Model (ESM). In the last 40 years, pH has decreased by 0.11 units in the Nordic Seas surface waters, a change that is twice as large as that between 1850-1980. We find that present trends are larger than expected from the increase in atmospheric CO2 alone, which is related to a faster increase in the seawater pCO2 compared with that of the atmosphere, i.e.