Reply to comment by X. Zhang on ‘‘Measurements of air-sea gas exchange at high wind speeds in the Southern Ocean: Implications for global parameterizations’’

[1] We thank Zhang [2007] for recognizing the significance and importance of our work. In his comment, he questioned whether we have correctly assessed the wind speed/gas transfer velocity relationship derived from the NZ SOLAS Air-Sea Gas Exchange (SAGE) experiment [Ho et al., 2006]. Specifically, he assumes that we only analyzed the gas transfer velocity data from SAGE using a quadratic wind speed enhancement and not a cubic wind speed enhancement. In fact, we concluded that the quadratic fits of Wanninkhof [1992] and Nightingale et al. [2000] were more consistent with the SAGE data than the cubic relationship of Wanninkhof and McGillis [1999], on the basis of statistical comparisons using corresponding quadratic and cubic wind speed enhancements. Also, he has misinterpreted a sentence in the abstract of Ho et al. [2006]: ‘‘The results clearly reveal a quadratic relationship between wind speed and gas transfer velocity, rather than a recently proposed cubic relationship’’ to mean that the data derived from the SAGE Experiment excludes all cubic relationships, when in fact, we were merely assessing existing wind speed/gas exchange relationships. In the following, we respond to the comment by Zhang [2007] and address both of his misunderstandings.