The Xiamen Symposium on Marine Environmental Sciences (XMAS 2025)

Carbonyl sulfide (COS) is the most abundant reduced sulphur compound in the stratosphere and plays a role in influencing global climate. Additionally, COS has been suggested as a potential tracer of monitoring gross primary productivity on land, making an accurate understanding of its atmospheric budget of COS crucial. In earlier budget exercises, Suntharalingam et al. (2008) indicated that the COS uptake by vegetation has been underestimated, raising the possibility of an unknown oceanic COS source. However, this hypothesis remains contested. The Southern and tropical Western Pacific Oceans have been identified as important COS hotspots and potential areas with the missing source that have been both temporally and spatially undersampled (Lennartz et al., 2021; Launois et al., 2015; Whelan et al., 2018). In this study, we provide the first continuous high-resolution observations from these two critical regions, at relatively high spatial and temporal resolution, to reassess global COS emissions and compare against model estimates.
 

carbonyl sulfide, Southern Ocean, western Pacific