Publication Date:
2016-09-12
Description:
The climate active trace-gas carbonyl sulfide (OCS) is the most abundant sulfur gas in the atmosphere. A missing source in its atmospheric budget is currently suggested, resulting from an upward revision of the vegetation sink in top-down approaches. Oceanic emissions have been proposed to close the resulting gap in the atmospheric budget. We present a bottom-up approach including new observations of OCS in surface waters of the tropical Atlantic, Pacific and Indian oceans to show that direct OCS emissions are insufficient to account for the missing source. Extrapolation of our observations using a biogeochemical box model suggests oceanic net uptake instead of emission for the entire tropical ocean area and, further, a global ocean source strength well below that suggested by top-down estimates. This bottom-up estimate of oceanic emissions has implications for using OCS as a proxy for terrestrial CO2 uptake, which is currently hampered by the inadequate quantification of atmospheric OCS sources and sinks.
Electronic ISSN:
1680-7375
Topics:
Geosciences