Indian Ocean Acidification and Its Driving Mechanisms Over the Last Four Decades (1980–2019)

Abstract

This paper aims to study the changes in the Indian Ocean seawater pH in response to the changes in sea-surface temperature, sea-surface salinity, dissolved inorganic carbon (DIC), and total alkalinity (ALK) over the period 1980–2019 and its driving mechanisms using a high-resolution regional model outputs. The analysis indicates that the rate of change of declining pH in the Arabian Sea (AS), the Bay of Bengal (BoB), and the Equatorial Indian Ocean (EIO) is −0.014 $\pm$ 0.002, −0.014 $\pm$ 0.001, and −0.015 $\pm$ 0.001 unit dec⁻¹, respectively. Both in AS and BoB (EIO), the highest (lowest) decadal DIC trend is found during 2000–2009. The surface acidification rate has accelerated throughout the IO region during 2010–2019 compared to the previous decades. Further, our analysis indicates that El Ninõ and positive Indian Ocean Dipole events lead to an enhancement of the Indian Ocean acidification. The increasing anthropogenic CO₂ uptake by the ocean dominantly controls 80% (94.5% and 85.7%) of the net pH trend (1980–2019) in AS (BoB and EIO), whereas ocean warming controls 14.4% (13.4% and 7.0%) of pH trends in AS (BoB and EIO). The changes in ALK contribute to enhancing the pH trend of AS by 5.0%. ALK dominates after DIC in the EIO and, similar to the AS, contributes to increasing the negative pH trend by 10.7%. In contrast, it has a buffering effect in the BoB, suppressing the pH trend by −5.4%.