Processes determining the marine alkalinity and carbonate saturation distributions

In this manuscript, the authors introduce a composite tracer Alk* to study the process determining the marine alkalinity and calcium carbonate saturation distributions. The authors present the global distributions of Alk* and estimate the riverine AT budget for different ocean basins. On regional scale, the authors highlight the high Alk* near river mouths due to riverine input and low Alk* in the Red Sea due to biological precipitation of CaCO3. For the variability of carbonate saturation state, the authors define a metric to evaluate the importance of various controlling factors. Overall, the subject of this manuscript meets the general interest of Biogeosciences and I support the publication of this work after a moderate modification. Please see below for my detailed comments.

• Publication year

  2014

• Venue

  Biogeosciences Discussions

• Publication date

  2014-07-01

• Fields of study

  Geology, Environmental Science

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.5194/BGD-11-11139-2014
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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