Sea breeze forcing of estuary turbulence and air-water CO2 exchange

The sea breeze is often a dominant meteorological feature at the coastline, but little is known about its estuarine impacts. Measurements at an anchored catamaran and meteorological stations along the Hudson River and New York Bay estuarine system are used to illustrate some basic characteristics and impacts of the feature. The sea breeze propagates inland, arriving in phase with peak solar forcing at seaward stations, but several hours later at up-estuary stations. Passage of the sea breeze front raises the water-to-air CO2 flux by 1–2 orders of magnitude, and drives turbulence comparable to spring tide levels in the upper meter of the water column, where most primary productivity occurs in this highly turbid system. Modeling and observational studies often use remotely-measured winds to compute air-water fluxes (e.g., momentum, CO2), and this leads to a factor of two flux error on sea breeze days during the study

Temporal and spatial dynamics of CO2 air-sea flux in the Gulf of Maine

Ocean surface layer carbon dioxide (CO2) data collected in the Gulf of Maine from 2004 to 2008 are presented. Monthly shipboard observations are combined with additional higher‐resolution CO2 observations to characterize CO2 fugacity ( fCO2) and CO2 flux over hourly to interannual time scales. Observed fCO2 andCO2 flux dynamics are dominated by a seasonal cycle, with a large spring influx of CO2 and a fall‐to‐winter efflux back to the atmosphere. The temporal results at inner, middle, and outer shelf locations are highly correlated, and observed spatial variability is generally small relative to the monthly to seasonal temporal changes. The averaged annual flux is in near balance and is a net source of carbon to the atmosphere over 5 years, with a value of +0.38 mol m−2 yr−1. However, moderate interannual variation is also observed, where years 2005 and 2007 represent cases of regional source (+0.71) and sink (−0.11) anomalies. We use moored daily CO2 measurements to quantify aliasing due to temporal undersampling, an important error budget term that is typically unresolved. The uncertainty of our derived annual flux measurement is ±0.26 mol m−2 yr−1 and is dominated by this aliasing term. Comparison of results to the neighboring Middle and South Atlantic Bight coastal shelf systems indicates that the Gulf of Maine exhibits a similar annual cycle and range of oceanic fCO2 magnitude but differs in the seasonal phase. It also differs by enhanced fCO2 controls by factors other than temperature‐driven solubility, including biological drawdown, fall‐to‐winter vertical mixing, and river runoff

A Parameter Model of Gas Exchange for the Seasonal Sea Ice Zone

Carbon budgets for the polar oceans require better constraint on air–sea gas exchange in the sea ice zone (SIZ). Here, we utilize advances in the theory of turbulence, mixing and air–sea flux in the ice–ocean boundary layer (IOBL) to formulate a simple model for gas exchange when the surface ocean is partially covered by sea ice. The gas transfer velocity (k) is related to shear-driven and convection-driven turbulence in the aqueous mass boundary layer, and to the mean-squared wave slope at the air–sea interface. We use the model to estimate k along the drift track of ice-tethered profilers (ITPs) in the Arctic. Individual estimates of daily-averaged k from ITP drifts ranged between 1.1 and 22 m d−1, and the fraction of open water (f) ranged from 0 to 0.83. Converted to area-weighted effective transfer velocities (keff), the minimum value of keff was 10−55 m d−1 near f = 0 with values exceeding keff = 5 m d−1 at f = 0.4. The model indicates that effects from shear and convection in the sea ice zone contribute an additional 40% to the magnitude of keff, beyond what would be predicted from an estimate of keff based solely upon a wind speed parameterization. Although the ultimate scaling relationship for gas exchange in the sea ice zone will require validation in laboratory and field studies, the basic parameter model described here demonstrates that it is feasible to formulate estimates of k based upon properties of the IOBL using data sources that presently exist

Investigations of air-sea gas exchange in the CoOP Coastal Air-Sea Chemical Exchange project

Author Posting. © Oceanography Society, 2008. This article is posted here by permission of Oceanography Society for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Oceanography 21, 4 (2008): 34-45.The exchange of CO2 and other gases across the ocean-air interface is an extremely important component in global climate dynamics, photosynthesis and respiration, and the absorption of anthropogenically produced CO2. The many different mechanisms and properties that control the air-sea flux of CO2 can have large spatial and temporal variability, particularly in the coastal environment. The need for making short-time-scale and small-spatial-scale estimates of gas transfer velocity, along with the physical and chemical parameters that affect it, provided a framework for the field experiments of the Coastal Ocean Processes Program (CoOP) Coastal Air-Sea Chemical Exchange (CASCEX) program. As such, the CASCEX project provided an opportunity to develop some of the first in situ techniques to estimate gas fluxes using micrometeorological and thermal imagery techniques. The results reported from the CASCEX experiments represent the first step toward reconciling the indirect but widely accepted estimates of gas exchange with these more direct, higher-resolution estimates over the coastal ocean. These results and the advances in sensor technology initiated during the CASCEX project have opened up even larger regions of the global ocean to investigation of gas exchange and its role in climate change.Funding for this work was provided by the National Science Foundation (NSF) CoOP program under grants OCE-9410534 and OCE-9711285

Direct covariance measurement of CO2 gas transfer velocity during the 2008 Southern Ocean Gas Exchange Experiment: Wind speed dependency

Direct measurements of air-sea heat, momentum, and mass (including CO2, DMS, and water vapor) fluxes using the direct covariance method were made over the open ocean from the NOAA R/V Ronald H. Brown during the Southern Ocean Gas Exchange (SO GasEx) program. Observations of fluxes and the physical processes associated with driving air-sea exchange are key components of SO GasEx. This paper focuses on the exchange of CO2 and the wind speed dependency of the transfer velocity, k, used to model the CO2 flux between the atmosphere and ocean. A quadratic dependence of k on wind speed based on dual tracer experiments is most frequently encountered in the literature. However, in recent years, bubble-mediated enhancement of k, which exhibits a cubic relationship with wind speed, has emerged as a key issue for flux parameterization in high-wind regions. Therefore, a major question addressed in SO GasEx is whether the transfer velocities obey a quadratic or cubic relationship with wind speed. After significant correction to the flux estimates (primarily due to moisture contamination), the direct covariance CO2 fluxes confirm a significant enhancement of the transfer velocity at high winds compared with previous quadratic formulations. Regression analysis suggests that a cubic relationship provides a more accurate parameterization over a wind speed range of 0 to 18 m s−1. The Southern Ocean results are in good agreement with the 1998 GasEx experiment in the North Atlantic and a recent separate field program in the North Sea

Green roof seasonal variation: comparison of the hydrologic behavior of a thick and a thin extensive system in New York City

Green roofs have been utilized for urban stormwater management due to their ability to capture rainwater locally. Studies of the most common type, extensive green roofs, have demonstrated that green roofs can retain significant amounts of stormwater, but have also shown variation in seasonal performance. The purpose of this study is to determine how time of year impacts the hydrologic performance of extensive green roofs considering the covariates of antecedent dry weather period (ADWP), potential evapotranspiration (ET0) and storm event size. To do this, nearly four years of monitoring data from two full-scale extensive green roofs (with differing substrate depths of 100 mm and 31 mm) are analyzed. The annual performance is then modeled using a common empirical relationship between rainfall and green roof runoff, with the addition of Julian day in one approach, ET0 in another, and both ADWP and ET0 in a third approach. Together the monitoring and modeling results confirm that stormwater retention is highest in warmer months, the green roofs retain more rainfall with longer ADWPs, and the seasonal variations in behavior are more pronounced for the roof with the thinner media than the roof with the deeper media. Overall, the ability of seasonal accounting to improve stormwater retention modeling is demonstrated; modification of the empirical model to include ADWP, and ET0 improves the model R 2 from 0.944 to 0.975 for the thinner roof, and from 0.866 to 0.870 for the deeper roof. Furthermore, estimating the runoff with the empirical approach was shown to be more accurate then using a water balance model, with model R 2 of 0.944 and 0.866 compared to 0.975 and 0.866 for the thinner and deeper roof, respectively. This finding is attributed to the difficulty of accurately parameterizing the water balance model

Evaluation of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration/Coupled-Ocean Atmospheric Response Experiment (NOAA/COARE) air-sea gas transfer parameterization using GasEx data

Author Posting. © American Geophysical Union, 2004. This article is posted here by permission of American Geophysical Union for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Journal of Geophysical Research 109 (2004): C08S11, doi:10.1029/2003JC001831.During the two recent GasEx field experiments, direct covariance measurements of air-sea carbon dioxide fluxes were obtained over the open ocean. Concurrently, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration/Coupled-Ocean Atmospheric Response Experiment air-sea gas transfer parameterization was developed to predict gas transfer velocities from measurements of the bulk state of the sea surface and atmosphere. The model output is combined with measurements of the mean air and sea surface carbon dioxide fugacities to provide estimates of the air-sea CO2 flux, and the model is then tuned to the GasEx-1998 data set. Because of differences in the local environment and possibly because of weaknesses in the model, some discrepancies are observed between the predicted fluxes from the GasEx-1998 and GasEx-2001 cases. To provide an estimate of the contribution to the air-sea flux of gas due to wave-breaking processes, the whitecap and bubble parameterizations are removed from the model output. These results show that moderate (approximately 15 m s−1) wind speed breaking wave gas transfer processes account for a fourfold increase in the flux over the modeled interfacial processes.This work was supported by the NOAA Office of Global Programs, under the leadership of Dr. Lisa Dilling. WHOI was supported by the National Science Foundation grant OCE-9711218

Rain impacts on CO2 exchange in the western equatorial Pacific Ocean

The ocean plays a major role in the global carbon cycle through the atmosphere-ocean partitioning of atmospheric carbon dioxide. Rain alters the physics and carbon chemistry at the ocean surface to increase the amount of CO2 taken up by the ocean. This paper presents the results of a preliminary study wherein rain measurements in the western equatorial Pacific are used to determine the enhanced transfer, chemical dilution and deposition effects of rain on air-sea CO2 exchange. Including these processes, the western equatorial Pacific CO2 flux is modified from an ocean source of +0.019 mol CO2 m−2 yr−1 to an ocean sink of −0.078 mol CO2 m−2 yr−1. This new understanding of rain effects changes the ocean's role in the global carbon budget, particularly in regions with low winds and high precipitation

Direct measurements of CO2 flux in the Greenland Sea

During summer 2006 eddy correlation CO2 fluxes were measured in the Greenland Sea using a novel system set-up with two shrouded LICOR-7500 detectors. One detector was used exclusively to determine, and allow the removal of, the bias on CO2 fluxes due to sensor motion. A recently published correction method for the CO2-H2O cross-correlation was applied to the data set. We show that even with shrouded sensors the data require significant correction due to this cross-correlation. This correction adjusts the average CO2 flux by an order of magnitude from -6.7 x 10⁻² mol m⁻² day⁻¹ to -0.61 x 10⁻² mol m⁻² day⁻¹, making the corrected fluxes comparable to those calculated using established parameterizations for transfer velocity

Sea surface pCO2 and O2 in the Southern Ocean during the austral fall, 2008

The physical and biological processes controlling surface mixed layer pCO2 and O2 were evaluated using in situ sensors mounted on a Lagrangian drifter deployed in the Atlantic sector of the Southern Ocean (∼50°S, ∼37°W) during the austral fall of 2008. The drifter was deployed three times during different phases of the study. The surface ocean pCO2 was always less than atmospheric pCO2 (−50.4 to −76.1 μatm), and the ocean was a net sink for CO2 with fluxes averaging between 16.2 and 17.8 mmol C m−2 d−1. Vertical entrainment was the dominant process controlling mixed layer CO2, with fluxes that were 1.8 to 2.2 times greater than the gas exchange fluxes during the first two drifter deployments, and was 1.7 times greater during the third deployment. In contrast, during the first two deployments the surface mixed layer was always a source of O2 to the atmosphere, and air-sea gas exchange was the dominant process occurring, with fluxes that were 2.0 to 4.1 times greater than the vertical entrainment flux. During the third deployment O2 was near saturation the entire deployment and was a small source of O2 to the atmosphere. Net community production (NCP) was low during this study, with mean fluxes of 3.2 to 6.4 mmol C m−2 d−1 during the first deployment and nondetectable (within uncertainty) in the third. During the second deployment the NCP was not separable from lateral advection. Overall, this study indicates that in the early fall the area is a significant sink for atmospheric CO2