Biogeosciences Discuss., https://doi.org/10.5194/bg-2019-152 Manuscript under review for journal Biogeosciences Discussion started: 25 April 2019 c Author(s) 2019. CC BY 4.0 License. Oceanic CO2 outgassing and biological production hotspots induced by pre-industrial river loads of nutrients and carbon in a global modelling approach Lacroix Fabrice1,2, Ilyina Tatiana1, and Hartmann Jens3 1Ocean in the Earth System, Max Planck Institute for Meteorology, Hamburg, Germany 2Department of Geoscience, Université Libre de Bruxelles, Brussels, Belgium 3Institute for Geology, Center for Earth System Research and Sustainability, University of Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany Correspondence to: Fabrice Lacroix (
[email protected]) Abstract. Rivers are a major source of nutrients, carbon and alkalinity for the global ocean, where the delivered compounds strongly impact biogeochemical processes. In this study, we firstly estimate pre-industrial riverine fluxes of nutrients, carbon and alkalinity based on a hierarchy of weathering and land-ocean export models, while identifying regional hotspots of the land-ocean exports. Secondly, we implement the riverine loads into a global biogeochemical ocean model and describe their 5 implications for oceanic nutrient concentrations, the net primary production (NPP) and CO2 fluxes globally, as well as in a regional shelf analysis. Thirdly, we quantify the terrestrial origins and the long-term oceanic fate of riverine carbon in the framework, while assessing the potential implementation of riverine carbon fluxes in a fully coupled land-atmosphere-ocean model. Our approach leads to annual pre-industrial riverine exports of 3.7 Tg P, 27 Tg N, 158 Tg Si and 603 Tg C, which were derived from weathering and non-weathering sources and were fractionated into organic and inorganic compounds.