The relationship between tropical CO₂ fluxes and the El Niño‐Southern Oscillation

This paper summarizes some features of the interannual variability of tropical CO 2 sources during 1980–95. Sources are derived from inversion of atmospheric concentration and isotopic data using three different techniques and two different transport models. We show that the tropical source is significantly correlated with the SOI. Composite CO 2 sources for ENSO events show an initial negative anomaly followed by a positive anomaly. We tentatively attribute the negative anomaly to the ocean and the positive anomaly to a terrestrial response.