Have you ever wanted to include the uncertainties along with your calculated marine CO2 system variables? Although a basic requirement for good science, the only way forward has been to code it yourself. Fortunately, it just got a lot easier.

Marine scientists who study the ocean CO2 system often use two of its measured or modeled variables to calculate the others, doing so with available public software packages. For instance, ocean pH is often calculated, not measured or modeled directly. But what about the uncertainties associated with those calculations? Unfortunately, they are seldom reported because none of the packages have provided an uncertainty propagation feature.

The few groups that have reported uncertainties have rolled their own, relying on different approaches, specifying different input uncertainties, and often assuming globally uniform sensitivities of calculated variables to input variables.

To allow such uncertainty propagation to become routine, the OA-ICC funded an effort to code a consistent set of tools in several public packages. Uncertainty propagation add-ons are now available for four of these packages: CO2SYS-Excel, CO2SYS-MATLAB, seacarb, and mocsy. Clicking on those links will lead you directly to the archive where each package can be downloaded, on CRAN for seacarb and on GitHub for the other 3 packages.

The interface for the CO2SYS-Excel add-on is provided in the same file as the standard package but as an additional (fourth) Excel sheet, where input uncertainties (standard uncertainties) are entered and where calculated uncertainties (combined standard uncertainties) are displayed (after clicking the red START button on Sheet 3). For the add-ons to the other three packages, each is provided as a new routine called errors with a suffix that depends on the computer language of each package (.m, .R, and .f90). Its arguments are just like those for the preexisting routine in each package that computes carbonate chemistry variables (CO2SYS.m, carb.R, and vars.f90, respectively) except that there is also a new line of arguments for the input uncertainties. Besides the typical documentation for each package, the new archives for CO2SYS-MATLAB, seacarb, and mocsy also contain a notebooks directory, which itself contains jupyter notebook files with extensive examples. Once in that directory, just click on a notebook file to visualize its contents as HTML. Even better, download them and and run them interactively in your browser as jupyter notebooks.

A new publication detailing this effort, the tools, and interpretation of results is now available (Orr et al., 2018).

REFERENCE

Orr, J. C., Epitalon, J.-M., Dickson, A. G., and Gattuso, J.-P. Routine uncertainty propagation for the marine carbon dioxide system, Mar. Chem., 207, 84-107, doi:10.1016/j.marchem.2018.10.006, 2018.