Methyl bromide: Ocean sources, ocean sinks, and climate sensitivity

Methyl bromide: ocean sources, ocean sinks, and climate sensitivity.

The oceans play an important role in the geochemical cycle of methyl bromide (CH3Br), the major carrier of O3-destroying bromine to the stratosphere. The quantity of CH3Br produced annually in seawater is comparable to the amount entering the atmosphere each year from natural and anthropogenic sources. The production mechanism is unknown but may be biological. Most of this CH3Br is consumed in ...

Ocean carbon sinks and international climate policy

Terrestrial vegetation sinks have entered the Kyoto Protocol as offsets for anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions, but ocean sinks have escaped attention. Ocean sinks are as unexplored and uncertain as were the terrestrial sinks at the time of negotiation of the Kyoto Protocol. It is not unlikely that certain countries will advocate the inclusion of ocean carbon sinks to reduce their emission ...

Ocean Circulation Kinetic Energy: Reservoirs, Sources, and Sinks

The ocean circulation is a cause and consequence of fluid scale interactions from millimeters to 10,000km. Although the wind field produces a large energy input to the ocean, all but about 10% appears to be dissipated within about 100m of the sea surface, rendering very difficult observations of the energy divergence necessary to maintain the full water column flow. Attention thus shifts to the...

Fundamentals of Ocean Climate Models Fundamentals of Ocean Climate Models

Terrestrial Sources and Sinks of Atmospheric Methyl Bromide : Three - Dimensional Modeling of Tropospheric

Current estimates of methyl bromide surface fluxes are inconsistent with the observed tropospheric mole fractions (9 to 10 ppt, globally averaged) and the calculated atmospheric lifetime (1.7 ± 0.2 years), with mid-range estimates of sinks exceeding sources by at least 50 Gg y-I. Given the uncertainties in process-specific surface flux estimates, we consider several distributions of terrestrial...