ALBERT

Description: © The Author(s), 2018. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License. The definitive version was published in Biogeosciences 15 (2018): 5891-5907, doi:10.5194/bg-15-5891-2018.

Description: Large-scale climatic forcing is impacting oceanic biogeochemical cycles and is expected to influence the water-column distribution of trace gases, including methane and nitrous oxide. Our ability as a scientific community to evaluate changes in the water-column inventories of methane and nitrous oxide depends largely on our capacity to obtain robust and accurate concentration measurements that can be validated across different laboratory groups. This study represents the first formal international intercomparison of oceanic methane and nitrous oxide measurements whereby participating laboratories received batches of seawater samples from the subtropical Pacific Ocean and the Baltic Sea. Additionally, compressed gas standards from the same calibration scale were distributed to the majority of participating laboratories to improve the analytical accuracy of the gas measurements. The computations used by each laboratory to derive the dissolved gas concentrations were also evaluated for inconsistencies (e.g., pressure and temperature corrections, solubility constants). The results from the intercomparison and intercalibration provided invaluable insights into methane and nitrous oxide measurements. It was observed that analyses of seawater samples with the lowest concentrations of methane and nitrous oxide had the lowest precisions. In comparison, while the analytical precision for samples with the highest concentrations of trace gases was better, the variability between the different laboratories was higher: 36% for methane and 27% for nitrous oxide. In addition, the comparison of different batches of seawater samples with methane and nitrous oxide concentrations that ranged over an order of magnitude revealed the ramifications of different calibration procedures for each trace gas. Finally, this study builds upon the intercomparison results to develop recommendations for improving oceanic methane and nitrous oxide measurements, with the aim of precluding future analytical discrepancies between laboratories.

Description: U.S. National Science Foundation (OCE-1546580); Funding for the gas standards was provided by the Center for Microbial Oceanography: Research and Education (C-MORE; EF0424599 to David M. Karl), SCOR, the EU FP7 funded Integrated non-CO2 Greenhouse gas Observation System (InGOS) (grant agreement no. 284274), and NOAA’s Climate Program Office, Climate Observations Division. Additional support was provided by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation no. 3794 (David M. Karl), the Simons Collaboration on Ocean Processes and Ecology (SCOPE; no. 329108 to David M. Karl), and the Global Research Laboratory Program (no. 2013K1A1A2A02078278 to David M. Karl) through the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF); Alyson E. Santoro would like to acknowledge NSF OCE-1437310. Mercedes de la Paz would like to acknowledge the support of the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (CTM2015-74510-JIN). Laura Farías received financial support from FONDAP 1511009 and FONDECYT no. 1161138