A Coupled Global Atmosphere-Ocean Model for Air-Sea Exchange of Mercury: Insights into Wet Deposition and Atmospheric Redox Chemistry

Air-sea exchange of mercury (Hg) is the largest flux between Earth system reservoirs. Global models simulate air-sea exchange based either on an atmospheric or ocean model simulation and treat the other media as a boundary condition. Here we develop a new modeling capability (NJUCPL) that couples GEOS-Chem (atmospheric model) and MITgcm (ocean model) at the native hourly model time step. The coupled model is evaluated against high-frequency simultaneous measurements of elemental mercury (Hg-0) in both the atmosphere and surface ocean obtained during five published cruises in the Atlantic, Pacific, and Southern Oceans. Results indicate that the calculated global Hg net evasion flux is 12% higher for the online model than the offline model. We find that the coupled online model captures the spatial pattern of the observations; specifically, it improves the representation of peak seawater Hg-0 (Hg-aq(0)) concentration associated with enhanced precipitation in the intertropical convergence zone in both the Atlantic and the Pacific Oceans. We investigate the causes of the observed Hg-aq(0) peaks with two sensitivity simulations and show that the high Hg-aq(0) concentrations are associated with elevated convective cloud mass flux and bromine concentrations in the tropical upper troposphere. Observations of elevated Hg-aq(0) concentrations in the western tropical Pacific Ocean merit further study involving BrO vertical distribution and cloud resolving models.