Improved estimates of North Atlantic deoxygenation trends by combining
shipboard and Argo observations using machine learning algorithms
Abstract
The ocean oxygen (O2) inventory has declined in recent decades but the
estimates of O2 trend is uncertain due to its sparse and irregular
sampling. A refined estimate of deoxygenation rate is developed for the
North Atlantic basin using machine learning techniques and
biogeochemical Argo array. The source data includes 159 thousand
historical shipboard (bottle and CTD-O2) profiles from 1965 to 2020 and
17 thousand Argo O2 profiles after 2005. Neural network and random
forest algorithms were trained using 80% of this data using different
hyperparameters and predictor variable sets. From a total of 240 trained
algorithms, 12 high performing algorithms were selected based on their
ability to accurately predict the 20% of oxygen data withheld from
training. The final product includes gridded monthly O2 ensembles with
similar skills (mean bias < 1mol/kg and R2 >
0.95). The reconstruction of basin-scale oxygen inventory shows a
moderate increase before 1980 and steep decline after 1990 in agreement
with a previous estimate using an optimal interpolation method. However,
significant differences exist between reconstructions trained with only
shipboard data and with both shipboard and Argo data. The gridded oxygen
datasets using only shipboard measurements resulted in a wide spread of
deoxygenation trends (0.8-2.7% per decade) during 1990-2010. When both
shipboard and Argo were used, the resulting deoxygenation trends
converged within a smaller spread (1.4-2.0% per decade). This study
demonstrates the importance of new biogeochemical Argo arrays in
combination with applications of machine learning techniques.