Underway seawater and atmospheric measurements of volatile organic compounds in the Southern Ocean

• Main Authors: Wohl, Charel, Brown, Ian, Kitidis, Vassilis, Jones, Anna E., Sturges, William T., Nightingale, Philip D., Yang, Mingxi
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: 2020
• Subjects: Southern Ocean
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.5194/bg-2020-2; https://www.biogeosciences-discuss.net/bg-2020-2/

Dimethyl sulfide and volatile organic compounds and are important for atmospheric chemistry. The oceanic emissions of biogenically derived gases, including dimethyl sulfide and especially isoprene, are not well constrained. The role of the ocean in the global budgets of atmospheric methanol, acetone and acetaldehyde is even more poorly known. In order to quantify the air-sea fluxes of these gases we measured their seawater concentrations and air mixing ratios in the Atlantic sector of the Southern Ocean, along a ~ 11 000 km long transect at approximately 60° S in Feb–Apr 2019. Concentrations, oceanic saturations and estimated fluxes of several simultaneously sampled volatile organic compounds (methanol, acetone, acetaldehyde, dimethyl sulfide and isoprene) are presented here. Campaign mean (± 1σ) surface water concentrations of dimethyl sulfide, isoprene, methanol, acetone and acetaldehyde were 2.60 (± 3.94), 0.0133 (± 0.0063), 67 (± 35), 5.5 (± 2.5) and 2.6 (± 2.7) nmol dm −3 respectively. In this dataset, seawater isoprene and methanol concentrations correlated positively. Furthermore, seawater acetone, methanol and isoprene concentrations were found to correlate negatively with the fugacity of carbon dioxide, possibly due to a common biological origin. Campaign mean (± 1σ) air mixing ratios of methanol, acetone and acetaldehyde were relatively low at 0.17 (± 0.08), 0.081 (± 0.031) and 0.049 (± 0.040) ppbv. We observed diel changes in averaged acetaldehyde concentrations in seawater and ambient air (and to a lesser degree also for acetone and isoprene), which suggest light-driven productions. Campaign mean (± 1σ) fluxes of 4.3 (± 7.4) µmol m −2 d −1 DMS and 0.028 (± 0.021) µmol m −2 d −1 isoprene are determined where a positive flux indicates from the ocean to the atmosphere. Methanol was largely undersaturated in the surface ocean with a mean (± 1σ) net flux of −2.4 (± 4.7) µmol m −2 d −1 , but also had a few occasional episodes of outgassing This section of the Southern Ocean was found to be both a source and a sink for acetone and acetaldehyde this time of the year, depending on location, resulting in a mean flux of −0.55 (± 1.15) µmol m −2 d −1 for acetone and −0.28 (± 1.22) µmol m −2 d −1 for acetaldehyde. The data collected here will be important for constraining the oceanic source/sink of these gases and potentially help to elucidate the presence of common sources/sinks for these compounds.