Dimethylsulfide emissions over the multi-year ice of the western Weddell Sea

Author Posting. © American Geophysical Union, 2008. This article is posted here by permission of American Geophysical Union for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Geophysical Research Letters 35 (2008): L06603, doi:10.1029/2007GL031847.This study, conducted in December 2004, is the first to present observations of DMS in a snow pack covering the multi-year sea ice of the western Weddell Sea. The snow layer is important because it is the interface through which DMS needs to be transported in order to be emitted directly from the ice to the overlying atmosphere. High concentrations of DMS, up to 6000 nmol m−3, were found during the first weeks of December but concentrations sharply decline as late spring-early summer progresses. This implies that DMS contained in sea ice is efficiently vented through the snow into the atmosphere. Indeed, field measurements by relaxed eddy accumulation indicate an average release of 11 μmol DMS m−2 d−1 from the ice and snow throughout December.This work was financially supported by the Marie Curie Training Site Fellowship (contract HPMF-CT-2002-01865), by NERC (award NER/B/S/2003/00844) and by the U.S. National Science Foundation (OCE-0327601, and OCE-0425166)