Abstract
The growth rate of atmospheric $CO_2$ undergoes significant interannual variability, largely due to temporal variability of partitioning of $CO_2$ between terrestrial biosphere and ocean. In the present paper, as a follow-up to the work by Lee et al. [1], we estimated the year-to-year variability in net global air-sea $CO_2$ fluxes between 1982 and 2003 from observed changes in wind speed and estimated changes in ${\Delta}pCO_2$ Changes in $pCO_{25W}$ were inferred from global records of sea surface temperature (SST) anomalies and seasonally varying SST dependence of $pCO_{25W}$. The modeled interannual variability of $\pm0.2\;Pg\;C\;yr^{-1}\;(1{\sigma})$ from the present work is significantly smaller than the values deduced from atmospheric observations of $^{1.3}CO_2/CO_2$ in conjunction with different atmospheric transport models, but it is closer to the recent estimates inferred from a 3-D ocean biogeochemical model and atmospheric transport models constrained with extensive observations of atmospheric $CO_2$.