Global relationships of total alkalinity with salinity and temperature in surface waters of the world's oceans

Abstract

A simple function of sea surface salinity (SSS) and temperature (SST) in the form A T = a + b (SSS − 35) + c (SSS − 35) 2 + d (SST − 20) + e (SST − 20) 2 fits surface total alkalinity (A T ) data for each of five oceanographic regimes within an area‐weighted uncertainty of ±8.1 μ mol kg −1 (1 σ ). Globally coherent surface A T data (n = 5,692) used to derive regional correlations of A T with SSS and SST were collected during the global carbon survey in the 1990s. Such region‐specific A T algorithms presented herein enable the estimation of the global distribution of surface A T when observations of SSS and SST are available.