Air‐sea gas transfer in the Southern Ocean

Abstract

Gas transfer velocities were determined in the Southern Ocean during the Southern Ocean Iron Fertilization experiment (SOFex) using the dual deliberate tracer technique. The decrease of the purposefully injected tracers, sulfur hexafluoride and helium‐3, could be well described by gas exchange parameterizations with wind speed that satisfy global constraints based on bomb‐14C uptake. The concentration decrease of tracers could be predicted slightly better with established relationships if gas transfer was modeled as a function of the cube rather than the square of the wind speed, particularly over a time interval with high and variable winds. However, both fits can model the concentration decrease within the uncertainty of the observations. This suggests that it will be singularly difficult to definitively determine if a quadratic or cubic dependence of gas exchange with wind is more appropriate based on deliberate tracer measurements. However, these results show that gas exchange rates in the Southern Ocean are not anomalous when compared with the rest of the ocean. Thus this cannot account for discrepancy between observational and model‐based estimates of uptake of CO2 in the Southern Ocean. Using a high‐quality wind speed field obtained from the QuikSCAT satellite Seawinds scatterometer and an established surface water pCO2 climatology, the CO2 uptake in the Southern Ocean (>34°S) is reassessed. The total uptake rates are similar to previous observation‐based estimates, but the analysis shows that the uptake rate is sensitive to wind speed product used and the wind speed distribution.