Gas exchange rates between air and sea

Advances in quantifying air-sea gas exchange and environmental forcing.

The past decade has seen a substantial amount of research on air-sea gas exchange and its environmental controls. These studies have significantly advanced the understanding of processes that control gas transfer, led to higher quality field measurements, and improved estimates of the flux of climate-relevant gases between the ocean and atmosphere. This review discusses the fundamental principl...

Spray-Mediated Air-Sea Gas Exchange: The Governing Time Scales

It is not known whether sea spray droplets can act as agents that influence air-sea gas exchange. We begin to address that question here by evaluating the time scales that govern spray-mediated air-sea gas transfer. To move between the interior of a spray droplet and the atmospheric gas reservoir, gas molecules must complete three distinct steps: (1) Gas molecules must mix between the interior ...

The role of bubbles during air-sea gas exchange

The potential for using the air-sea exchange rate of oxygen as a tracer for net community biological production in the ocean is greatly enhanced by recent accuracy improvements for in situ measurements of oxygen on unmanned platforms. A limiting factor for determining the exchange process is evaluating the air-sea flux contributed by bubble processes produced by breaking waves, particularly dur...

Air–sea exchange and gas–particle partitioning of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons in the Mediterranean

Polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon (PAH) concentration in air of the central and eastern Mediterranean in summer 2010 was 1.45 (0.30–3.25) ng m−3 (sum of 25 PAHs), with 8 (1–17) % in the particulate phase, almost exclusively associated with particles < 0.25 μm. The total deposition flux of particulate PAHs was 0.3–0.5 μ g m−2 yr−1. The diffusive air–sea exchange fluxes of fluoranthene and pyrene w...

Near Surface Turbulence and Gas Exchange Across the Air-Sea Interface