Publication Date:
2017-11-27
Description:
Precipitation is the largest physical removal pathway of atmospheric reactive organic carbon in the form of dissolved organic carbon (DOC). We present the first global DOC distribution simulated with a global model. A total of 85 and 188 Tg C yr−1 are deposited to the ocean and the land, respectively, with DOC ranging between 0.1 and 10 mg C L−1 in this GEOS-Chem simulation. We compare the 2010 simulated DOC to a 30 year synthesis of measurements. Despite limited measurements and imperfect temporal matching, the model is able to reproduce much of the spatial variability of DOC (r = 0.63), with a low bias of 35%. We present the global average carbon oxidation state (OSc) as a simple metric for describing the chemical composition. In the atmosphere, (OSc), and the increase in solubility upon oxidation leads to a global increase in (OSc) in precipitation with -0.6≤OScDOC≤0. ©2017. American Geophysical Union. All Rights Reserved.
Print ISSN:
0094-8276
Electronic ISSN:
1944-8007
Topics:
Geosciences
,
Physics
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