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Based on archived ship reports (Comprehensive Ocean-Atmosphere Data Set) and meteorological analyses from the European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forcast we have constructed a climatology of surface windspeed over the ocean consisting of monthly means and standard deviation on a global 2by 2horizontal resolution grid.Representing the local instantaneous windspeed by means of a Weibull frequency distribution, where the parameters are determined from the monthly mean value and standard deviation, we evaluated the global spatial and temporal distribution of the gas exchange coefficient for 002 based on the recently proposed parametrization by Liss and Merlivat 1986.Climatological sea surface temperatures have been used in the specification of the Schmitt number.The effects of sea.ice, which is assumed to inhibit gas exchange, is also taken into account.The resulting globally and annually averaged value of the exchange coefficient, 0.0356 mol m"2 yr"1 patm'l, is a factor of 1.7 smaller than previous estimates based on either the natural radiocarbon balance between the air and the sea or the oceanic uptake of excess bomb radiocarbon as measured during the GEOSECS expeditions.The fields of the exchange coefficient exhibit large contrasts between high and low latitudes (a factor of 4) which can be validated in principle by means of the preindustrial assumed steady state air-sea distribution of the carbon isotope ratio 13C/u'C.
Heimann et al. (Sun,) studied this question.