Abstract
<jats:p> The Southern Ocean is the stormiest place on Earth, but sparse observations challenge our ability to understand the influence of storms on air-sea CO <jats:sub>2</jats:sub> fluxes. Here we quantify storm-driven Southern Ocean CO <jats:sub>2</jats:sub> fluxes using synthetic floats that mimic real-world platforms in a physical-biogeochemical simulation of the Energy Exascale Earth System Model between 2014 and 2023. By subsampling our array at the same resolution as real-world arrays, we diagnose the capability of current observations in capturing CO <jats:sub>2</jats:sub> fluxes in storms. We find that storms induce anomalous CO <jats:sub>2</jats:sub> outgassing, with an average flux anomaly of 0.87 mmol C m <jats:sup>-2</jats:sup> day <jats:sup>-1</jats:sup> However, when the synthetic float array is reduced to match observations, storm-driven CO <jats:sub>2</jats:sub> fluxes cannot be fully captured. The magnitude and spatial pattern of CO <jats:sub>2</jats:sub> fluxes within storms are dominated by wind speed and atmospheric pressure, suggesting that knowledge of high-resolution atmospheric fields are required to resolve storm impacts on CO <jats:sub>2</jats:sub> fluxes. </jats:p>