Datasets of reconstructed sea surface pCO2 in the South China Sea

The South China Sea (SCS) is a largest marginal sea of the North Pacific Ocean and is one of the world’s most studied model ocean margins in carbon cycle owing to intensive field observations including sea-surface pCO2 accumulated during the last two decades. However, the datasets of underway sea surface pCO2 data of the SCS is still temporally and spatially incomplete. By using a machine learning based method facilitated by empirical orthogonal functions, this study provides a reconstructed monthly database of sea surface pCO2 over the SCS with a reasonably high spatial resolution of (0.05º×0.05º) and a temporal coverage between 2003 and 2020.