A database of Marine Aerosol, Nitrous Oxide and Methane from the global oceans

Pollution of the marine atmosphere has received considerable attention in past years, and atmospheric and marine measurements of pollutants have been carried out at various ocean sites. However, in many instances the data remains solely with the individual scientist or research group(s), thereby limiting public access to these valuable data sets.

To address this issue, we have developed an online data repository of atmospheric aerosol and rain (http://www.bodc.ac.uk/solas_integration/implementation_products/group1/aerosol_rain/) chemical data measured exclusively from ship platforms and remote island sites. Here, we primarily focus on collating trace-metals, nutrients and organics data, but other data is also equally welcome. Currently, the database holds about 1,341 aerosol and 115 rain data points measured over the global oceans and remote island sites. In future, we aim to look at the temporal and spatial variation of various trace metals/nutrients and their deposition to the ocean surface.

To improve our understanding of the oceanic distribution of methane (CH₄) and nitrous oxide (N₂O) and to accurately estimate their flux to the atmosphere, a MarinE MethanE and NiTrous Oxide database (‘MEMENTO') has been developed (https://memento.geomar.de/). This database aims at collating all the marine surface and/or depth profiles of CH₄ and N₂O on a single server with open access to the scientific community. To date there are about 21,432 CH₄ and 99,084 N₂O oceanic measurements dating back to 1975 and 1976, respectively. The N₂O/CH₄ data will be used to compute global fields of dissolved N₂O/CH₄ concentrations as well as their air-sea fluxes in both the open and coastal ocean.