Strong winds in Southern Ocean storms drive air-sea carbon and heat
fluxes. These fluxes are integral to the global climate system and the
wind speeds that drive them are increasing. The current scatterometer
constellation measuring vector winds remotely undersamples these storms
and the higher winds within them, leading to potentially large biases in
Southern Ocean wind reanalyses and the fluxes that derive from them.
This observing system design study addresses these issues in two ways.
First, we describe an addition to the scatterometer constellation,
called Southern Ocean Storms -- Zephyr, to increase the frequency of
independent observations, better constraining high winds. Second, we
show that potential reanalysis wind biases over the Southern Ocean lead
to uncertainty over the sign of the net winter carbon flux. More
frequent independent observations per day will capture these higher
winds and reduce the uncertainty in estimates of the global carbon and
heat budgets.