Carbon dioxide is one of several gases implicated in greenhouse warming.
As an air mass travels from west to east, it should receive carbon dioxide and the East Coast concentration of CO2 should be higher than on the West Coast. But observations tell us otherwise. The mean atmospheric CO2 concentration on the East Coast has been observed to be lower than that over the Pacific coast. This means that more CO2 is taken up by land ecosystems over the United States than is released by industrial activities. The researchers used atmospheric data provided by Dr. Tans, observations of ocean-based sinks contributed by Dr. Takahashi, and one ocean and two separate atmospheric models developed at Princeton's Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory.