In 2010 a series of community and plenary white papers were published as part of the OceanObs'09 proceedings which set out decadal challenges to the surface ocean CO2 flux community as well as identifying technical obstacles towards achieving them. Perhaps one of the biggest challenges is the reduction of the global flux uncertainty to a level that is necessary and meaningful to resolve interannual trends. Presently, this is considered to be in the 10 – 15% range. While this has been achieved on the basis of SOOP observations in some regions such as the North Atlantic, it is clear that the same approach is not feasible in the Southern Ocean south of 30S where seasonal biases are an additional challenge. Surface Ocean CO2 ATlas has emerged in the past 4 years, following the 2007 Surface Ocean CO2 Variability and Vulnerability Workshop, as a platform to support the global CO2 observing community to agree to minimum data quality standards that would help reduce the sampling error contribution to regional and global flux uncertainties. As the global surface ocean CO2 data set has become both better distributed, improved quality and sustained it has also become useful resource for data assimilation into operational carbon - climate models. Emerging advances of sensor technology are likely to make CO2 observations viable on autonomous platforms with improved precision, accuracy and reduced power consumption. This workshop uses the CWP from the Surface Ocean Observation community (attached) together with other topic specific CWPs as a starting point to assemble issues and participants from all the communities (observational, modelling, sensor development, platform development & operations, data management) that have a strong contribution to make in enabling the decadal goals to be achieved in a realistic way. The workshop will run as a mix of plenaries and theme focused discussion groups. This workshop would have a technical focus and complement the planned SOCAT SOLAS SIC science meeting in September 2011.