ACPD Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics Discussions ACPD 1680-7375 Copernicus GmbH Göttingen, Germany 10.5194/acpd-6-8189-2006 Technical note: The MESSy-submodel AIRSEA calculating the air-sea exchange of chemical species Pozzer A. 1 Jöckel P. 1 Sander R. 1 Ganzeveld L. 1 Lelieveld J. 1 Max Planck Institute for Chemistry, Mainz, Germany 29 08 2006 6 4 8189 8214 This is an open-access article ditributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. This article is available from http://www.atmos-chem-phys-discuss.net/6/8189/2006/acpd-6-8189-2006.html The full text article is available as a PDF file from http://www.atmos-chem-phys-discuss.net/6/8189/2006/acpd-6-8189-2006.pdf

The new submodel AIRSEA for the Modular Earth Submodel System (MESSy) is presented. It calculates the exchange of chemical species between the ocean and the atmosphere with a focus on organic compounds. The submodel can be easily extended to a large number of tracers, including highly soluble ones. It is demonstrated that application of explicitly calculated air-sea exchanges with AIRSEA can induce substantial changes in the simulated tracer distributions in the troposphere in comparison to a model version in which this process is neglected. For example, the simulations of acetone, constrained with measured oceanic concentrations, shows relative changes in the atmospheric surface layer mixing ratios over the Atlantic Ocean up to 300%.