Potential Implications of the Sesquiterpene Presence over the Remote Marine Boundary Layer in the Arctic Region

We present reactive VOC observations over the North Pacific and the Arctic Ocean from airborne and shipborne measurements, investigating, in particular, distributions of biogenic volatile organic compounds that may be emitted from phytoplankton. In contrast to terrestrial observations, isoprene (C 5...

Full description

Bibliographic Details
Published in:Atmosphere
Main Authors: Keyhong Park, Blanca Rodriguez, Jerry Thomas, Dasa Gu, Miming Zhang, Chinmoy Sarkar, Alex Guenther, Saewung Kim
Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
Language:English
Published: MDPI AG 2023
Subjects:
DMS
Online Access:https://doi.org/10.3390/atmos14050823
https://doaj.org/article/79d9e699285342b7bc76743a124a5425
Description
Summary:We present reactive VOC observations over the North Pacific and the Arctic Ocean from airborne and shipborne measurements, investigating, in particular, distributions of biogenic volatile organic compounds that may be emitted from phytoplankton. In contrast to terrestrial observations, isoprene (C 5 H 8 ), the most dominant BVOC emission from the terrestrial ecosystem, was mostly present under the lower detection limit along with monoterpenes (C 10 H 16 ), the second largest emission from the terrestrial ecosystem. However, we consistently detected sesquiterpenes (C 15 H 24 ) over the Arctic Ocean for the two Arctic cruises. The results of the analysis of sorbent cartridge samplings conducted over the Arctic Ocean on Korean icebreaker R/V Araon in 2016 and 2017 illustrate that few tens ppt levels of sesquiterpenes were present over the Arctic Ocean. Moreover, the concentration variation was positively correlated with the quantitative indicators of ocean biological activities, such as chlorophyll- a , dissolved DMS, and the ratio of dissolved O 2 and Ar. This suggests that further investigations on sesquiterpene’s emission and atmospheric transformation processes over the marine boundary layer are required.