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Re-examination of global emerging patterns of ocean DMS concentration

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Abstract

During the last decade the number of seawater dimethylsulfide (DMS) concentration measurements has increased substantially. The importance this gas, emitted from the ocean to the atmosphere, may have in the cloud microphysics and hence in the Earth albedo and radiation budget, makes it necessary to accurately reproduce the global distribution. Recently, the monthly global DMS climatology has been updated taking advantage of the threefold increased size and better resolved distribution of the observations available in the DMS database. Here, the emerging patterns found with the previous versions of the database and climatology are explored with the updated versions. The statistical relationships between the seasonalities of DMS concentrations and other variables are re-examined. The positive correlation previously found between surface seawater DMS and the daily-averaged climatological solar radiation dose in the upper mixed layer of the open ocean is confirmed with both the updated DMS database and climatology. Re-examination of the latitudinal match-mismatch between the seasonalities of DMS and phytoplankton, represented by the chlorophyll a concentration, reveals that they are highly positively correlated in latitudes higher than 40°, but anti-correlated in the 20°–40° latitudinal bands of both hemispheres. Overall, these global emerging patterns provide key information to further understanding the factors that control the emission of volatile sulfur from the ocean. The large uncertainties associated with the methodologies used in global computations, however, call for caution in using these emerging patterns as predictive tools, and prompt to the design of time series and process-oriented studies aimed at testing the validity of the observed relationships.

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Acknowledgments

The authors want to thank each of the individual contributors that generously submitted their DMS data to the Global Surface Seawater Dimethylsulfide Database, and to J.E. Johnson and T.S. Bates for the maintenance of the database. We thank M. Galí and the two reviewers for their helpful comments. We thank the Ocean Biology Processing Group at GSFC for the production and distribution of the monthly chlorophyll a data. This work was supported by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation through the projects MIMOSA, PRISMA and Malaspina 2010, and through a PhD studentship to A.L.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. ICM, CSIC, Barcelona, Spain

    Arancha Lana & Rafel Simó

  2. EAPS, MIT, Cambridge, MA, USA.

    Sergio M. Vallina

  3. IDAEA, CSIC, Barcelona, Spain

    Jordi Dachs

Authors
  1. Arancha Lana
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  2. Rafel Simó
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  3. Sergio M. Vallina
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  4. Jordi Dachs
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Correspondence to Arancha Lana.

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Lana, A., Simó, R., Vallina, S.M. et al. Re-examination of global emerging patterns of ocean DMS concentration. Biogeochemistry 110, 173–182 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10533-011-9677-9

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