Analysis of the PKT correction for direct CO₂ flux measurements over the ocean

Abstract

Abstract. Eddy covariance measurements of air–sea CO2 fluxes can be affected by cross-sensitivities of the CO2 measurement to water vapour, resulting in order-of-magnitude biases. Well established causes for these biases are (i) cross-sensitivity of the broadband non-dispersive infrared sensors due to band-broadening and spectral overlap (commercial sensors typically correct for this) and (ii) the effect of air density fluctuations (removed by determining the CO2 mixing ratio respective to dry air). However, another bias related to water vapour fluctuations has recently been observed with open-path sensors, and was attributed to sea salt build-up and water films on sensor optics. Two very different approaches have been used to deal with these water vapour-related biases. Miller et al. (2010) employed a membrane drier to physically eliminate 97% of the water vapour fluctuations in the sample air before it enters the gas analyser. Prytherch et al. (2010a) on the other hand, employed the empirical (Peter K. Taylor, PKT) post-processing correction to correct open-path sensor data. In this paper, we test these methods side by side using data from the Surface Ocean Aerosol Production (SOAP) experiment in the Southern Ocean. The air–sea CO2 flux was directly measured with four closed-path analysers, two of which were positioned down-stream of a membrane dryer. The CO2 fluxes from the two dried gas analysers matched each other and were in general agreement with common parametrisations. The flux estimates from the un-dried sensors agreed with the dried sensors only during periods with low latent heat flux (≤ 7 W m−2). When latent heat flux was higher, CO2 flux estimates from the un-dried sensors exhibited large scatter and an order-of magnitude bias. We applied the PKT correction to the flux data from the un-dried analysers and found that it did not remove the bias when compared to the data from the dried gas analyser. Our detailed analysis of the correction algorithm reveals that this method is not valid for the correction of CO2 fluxes.