The US JGOFS Synthesis and Modeling Project – An introduction

The field data collected as part of the international Joint Global Ocean Flux Study (JGOFS) provide an unprecedented view of marine biogeochemistry and the ocean carbon cycle. Following the completion of a series of regional process studies, a global CO2 survey, and a decade of sampling at two open-ocean time-series, US JGOFS initiated in 1997 a final research phase, the Synthesis and Modeling Project (SMP). The objective of the US JGOFS SMP is to “synthesize knowledge gained from the US JGOFS and related studies into a set of models that reflect our current understanding of the oceanic carbon cycle”. Here we present an overview of the SMP and highlight the early scientific results from the project.