Dr Jorge L Sarmiento

Dr. Sarmiento's principal research interests are in the oceanic cycles of climatically important chemicals such as carbon dioxide, and in the use of chemical tracers to study ocean circulation. He has published widely on ocean tracers and the ocean carbon cycle, its history, its ongoing and potential future perturbations by mankind, and its relationship to climate change. Present research includes the use of ocean general circulation models to estimate uptake of anthropogenic CO2 and to examine scenarios for the sequestration of anthropogenic carbon by injection into the deep ocean as well as micro- and macro-nutrient fertilization of the surface ocean. He also uses atmospheric general circulation models constrained with atmospheric CO2 observations in inverse models that estimate transport of CO2 in the atmosphere and carbon sources and sinks in the ocean and on land. He recently began to apply the inverse model methods developed for atmospheric studies to the ocean carbon cycle, and is presently working on a combined atmosphere-ocean inverse model. He is working in conjunction with ocean biologists to develop ecosystem models for predicting photosynthetic uptake of carbon in the surface ocean, as well as remineralization of organic matter in the deep ocean. He is also using coupled atmosphere-ocean models of climate warming to study the impact of anthropogenic climate warming on the global carbon cycle.