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Spatial predictions of sea surface dimethylsulfide concentrations in the high arctic

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Abstract

The climatically-important compound dimethylsulfide (DMS) has been reported to be abundant in the Arctic, particularly in the marginal sea ice zone. Due to these high concentrations, it may play an important role in climate control. A DMS monthly climatology for July through October was created employing various ocean characteristics and spatial modeling techniques commonly used for describing species distributions in ecology. Comparisons between observed and predicted values of surface seawater DMS concentrations led to r 2 values of 0.61, 0.87, 0.66, and 0.37 for July, August, September, and October, respectively. Measurement data used for model development for July through October were variably distributed spatially. For October only, data were sparse and clustered, resulting in the poor results obtained for this month. Mean sea ice concentration and surface nitrate concentrations were found to be important predictors of surface seawater DMS concentrations. A negative relationship between sea ice concentration and DMS, and a two-phase relationship between nitrate and DMS were found. The two-phase relationship may be indicative of how DMS concentrations are affected when nitrate is the limiting nutrient. From July to September, predicted DMS concentrations were generally lowest under the sea ice. High monthly DMS concentrations (up to 10.7 nM) were predicted in the seasonal ice zone. The highest DMS concentrations in September (~2.6 nM) were predicted along the ice edge. In order to create more accurate climatologies and to increase our understanding of sulfur cycling in the Arctic, a higher spatial and temporal distribution of DMS measurements is required.

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Acknowledgments

We would like to thank all contributors to the DMS database (Please see Table 4 in Appendix for a full list of contributors to Arctic DMS measurements and associated references). Sincere thanks go to Dr. S. Vallina for providing mixed-layer depth and irradiance values at the top of the atmosphere layers which were used to calculate solar radiation dose. We would also like to thank T. Alton and C. O’Connor for thoughtful comments and draft editing, I. Rutzen for original data manipulations, and the EWHALE lab and Salford Systems Ltd. for support with software licensing. Partial funding for this project was from NSF ARC-0652838. This is EWHALE lab publication 110.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Center for Sustainability: Agriculture, Food, Energy and Environment, University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand

    Grant R. W. Humphries

  2. International Arctic Research Center, University of Alaska Fairbanks, Fairbanks, AK, USA

    Clara J. Deal

  3. Division of Computational Sciences, Climate Ocean Sea Ice Modeling, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos, NM, USA

    Scott Elliott

  4. EWHALE Lab, Institute of Arctic Biology, Department of Biology and Wildlife, University of Alaska Fairbanks, Fairbanks, AK, USA

    Falk Huettmann

Authors
  1. Grant R. W. Humphries
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  2. Clara J. Deal
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  3. Scott Elliott
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  4. Falk Huettmann
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Grant R. W. Humphries.

Appendix

Appendix

See Table 4 and Fig. 7.

Table 4 Contributors of DMS measurements to the PMEL database initiated by Kettle et al. (2000)
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Fig. 7
figure 7

Partial dependence plot of surface nitrate concentrations against the function of DMS predictions fitted with a logistic curve to show partial dependence pattern

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Humphries, G.R.W., Deal, C.J., Elliott, S. et al. Spatial predictions of sea surface dimethylsulfide concentrations in the high arctic. Biogeochemistry 110, 287–301 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10533-011-9683-y

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