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The intense rainfall in the tropical Atlantic spatially overlaps with the spread of the Amazon plume. Based on remote‐sensed sea surface salinity and rainfall, we removed the contribution of rainfall to the apparent Amazon plume area, thus refining the quantification of its extension (0.84 ± 0.06 × 106 km2 to 0.89 ± 0.06 × 106 km2). Despite the previous overestimation of the Amazon plume area due to the influence of rainfall (>16%), our calculated annual CO2 flux based on rainfall‐corrected sea surface CO2 fugacity confirms that the Amazon River plume is an atmospheric CO2 sink of global importance (−7.61 ± 1.01 to −7.85 ± 1.02 Tg C yr−1). Yet we show that current sea‐air CO2 flux assessments for the tropical Atlantic could be overestimated in about 10% by neglecting the CO2 sink associated to the Amazon plume. Thus, including the Amazon plume, the sea‐air CO2 exchange for the tropical Atlantic is estimated to be 81.1 ± 1.1 to 81.5 ± 1.1 Tg C yr−1.
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Ibánhez et al. (2016) studied this question.
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