Dorothee Bakker
Dr. Dorothee C.E. Bakker
School of Environmental Sciences
University of East Anglia
Norwich NR4 7TJ
United Kingdom
Tel. +44 1603.592648
Fax. +44 1603.591327
D.Bakker(at)uea.ac.uk
Research Interests
Oceanic carbon cycling, the oceanic uptake of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide (CO2), interactions between marine biogeochemical cycles and the role of biogeochemical cycles in climate change are the focus of my research and publications.Extensive measurements of surface water pCO2 are an important means for quantifying the oceanic uptake of CO2. An important aim of the EU CARBOOCEAN project is the annual quantification of the oceanic CO2 sink in the North Atlantic Ocean. This is a vast task on which researchers in the EU and the USA are collaborating. North-south transects across the Atlantic Ocean contribute towards a better quantification of CO2 air-sea exchange for the South Atlantic Ocean, most recently as part of the AMT program. Easy data access and safe data storage are key to rapid assessments of oceanic CO2 uptake. CARBOOCEAN fully supports this philosophy by encouraging its PIs to submit their historic and recent CO2 data to international WDC-databases.
The size of the Southern Ocean CO2 sink and the role of iron supply in Southern Ocean carbon cycling are important themes in my research. I was part of international teams of scientists, which tested whether low iron concentrations limit phytoplankton growth in parts of the Southern Ocean. Iron additions promoted algal growth and a decrease of pCO2 and dissolved inorganic carbon (DIC) in the mixed layer in the SOIREE and the EISENEX experiments, thus confirming iron limitation of algal growth in these waters. Iron fertilisation of parts of the ocean, notably the Southern Ocean, has been suggested as a means for reducing global warming. In 2004 I prepared a review of the advantages and disadvantages of climate mitigation by iron fertilisation. The effects of natural iron fertilisation on algal growth were studied the Polar Front at 6W (47-50S, Atlantic sector) and near the Crozet Plateau in the Southern Indian Ocean. Carbon budgets of the mixed layer for 6W, SOIREE and EisenEx highlight the effect of biological and physical processes on pCO2 and DIC. Study of carbon cycling in the ice-covered Weddell Sea is underway. Currently I (co-)supervise four PhD students which investigate a variety of topics, ranging from the formation of Antarctic Intermediate Water in OCCAM, interpolation techniques of surface water pCO2, air-sea CO2 fluxes in subantarctic waters and pteropods.
Academic background
- Student at
Merlewood Research Station, Centre for Ecology and Hydrology,
formerly Institute of Terrestrial Ecology,
Grange-over-Sands, Cumbria, U.K., in 1989.
- M.Sc. in Soil Science at the Agricultural University of Wageningen,
The Netherlands, 1991.
- Ph.D. student at the
Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research (NIOZ) at Texel from 1991 to 1996.
- Ph.D. at the Faculty of Mathematics and Science, Rijksuniversiteit Groningen, The Netherlands, in 1998.
- Research associate in the
Laboratoire d’Océanographie Dynamique et de Climatologie (LODYC),
now known as LOCEAN,
Université Pierre et Marie Curie, Paris, France, between 1996 and 1998.
- Senior research associate (1998-2005) and Research Officer (since 2006)
at the
School of Environmental Sciences,
University of East Anglia,
Norwich, U.K.