News

The Global Carbon Budget 2025 has recently been published in Earth System Science Data (ESSD). Among the key messages of this year’s assessment is that the remaining carbon budget compatible with limiting global warming to 1.5 °C is now virtually exhausted. In addition, the ocean carbon sink has been revised upward, in contrast to the land carbon sink, which has been reassessed downward. This updated evaluation has contributed to an overall improvement in the consistency and closure of the global carbon budget.

• • Global Carbon Budget website
  • Key messages from GCB 2025
  • Full article

Leticia Barbero and Denis Pierrot, supported by the NOAA Global Ocean Monitoring and Observing program, are holding a workshop on taking pCO₂ General Oceanics from ships on 10-12 March 2026 in Miami, Florida:

“We are pleased to announce a technical workshop in Miami focusing on the operation and data processing of General Oceanics pCO₂ systems. This workshop is designed for researchers, technicians, and students interested in principles and hands-on experience of automated measurement of oceanographic surface water carbon dioxide. The workshop is in support of the surface water CO2 network (www.soconet.info).”

Full details can be found in the link below:

UWpCO2_Workshop Announcement

On the 22nd January 2026 we will hold a SOCAT secondary data quality control (QC) hackathon. This will run for 24 hours starting at 00:00 UTC.

Please mark this in your calendar and let’s get the secondary QC done together. A Zoom meeting will be open the whole time giving everyone the chance to chat and exchange about QC issues while QCing data sets. We hope to find enough experienced QCer’s to cover all time zones and they can assist with data QC if questions arise.

Full details can be found here.

SOCAT v2025 is released today, with 2.9 million new observations.

Download the new version from https://socat.info/v2025

A poster summarising the key points of the release (including the continued decline in observation coverage) is available from: https://socat.info/index.php/posters/

We will be organising a 24-hour SOCAT QC hackathon on 3rd February 2026. We invite old and new SOCAT data enthusiasts to join us for 24 hours of secondary quality control. Experienced data QCers will be on hand for the whole day, and every 4 hours we will have a short SOCAT QC presentation. Let’s get secondary QC done together!

More information about the hackathon will be available nearer the date.

SOCAT has published an update to the Quality Control Cookbook for use in SOCAT v2025. Download it here: SOCAT Cookbook for v2025.

SOCAT v2024 is released today, with 3.9 million new observations.

Download the new version from https://socat.info/index.php/data-access/

A poster summarising the key points of the release (including the continued decline in observation coverage) is available from: https://socat.info/wp-content/uploads/

The last week has seen the release of the Declaration on Operationalising the Surface Ocean Carbon Value Chain, also known as the Ostend Declaration, in which 100+ ocean experts and stakeholders call for concerted international and intergovernmental efforts to create a robust, resilient and sustainable surface ocean carbon observing system.

In 2023 the SOCAT community produced A Case for SOCAT laying out the cruicial role that SOCAT plays in understanding the ocean carbon cycle and therefore the Earth’s global carbon budgets.

SOCAT V2023 was released on the 20th of June 2023. For more information, please see the release poster.