Surface water data collected for the Arctic Ocean 2018 marine aerosol reference tank experiments

Jessica A. Mirrielees, Rachel M. Kirpes, Patricia A. Matrai, Kerri A. Pratt

This dataset includes measurements of water temperature, salinity, chlorophyll a, dissolved organic carbon (DOC), dissolved organic nitrogen (DON), particulate organic carbon (POC), particulate organic nitrogen (PON), and the abundances of nanoplankton/picoplankton, bacteria, and heterotrophic nanoplankton from the marine aerosol reference tank (MART) experiments conducted during the Arctic Ocean 2018 expedition to the central Arctic Ocean in August and September 2018.

The MART employed a plunging jet mechanism to generate sea spray aerosol particles. A series of 10 aerosol generation experiments were carried out using locally collected surface water from various locations in the Arctic, including the marginal ice zone, the North Pole, several open lead sites, and a melt pond on an ice floe.

Several of the values in this dataset represent a single measurement for the experiment (salinity, cell abundance) while others are presented as mean values and standard deviations (water temperature, DOC, DON, POC, PON). Several of these measurements (POC, PON, cell abundance) were carried out for the first nine experiments but not the filtered seawater experiment.

Citation

Jessica A. Mirrielees, Rachel M. Kirpes, Patricia A. Matrai, Kerri A. Pratt (2024) Surface water data collected for the Arctic Ocean 2018 marine aerosol reference tank experiments. Dataset version 1. Bolin Centre Database. https://doi.org/10.17043/oden-ao-2018-mart-surface-water-1

Data description

The data are provided in one comma-separated values (csv) file (~2 kB).

File structure (columns) and contents:

1. name of experiment (description of water sampling location)
2. date (YYYY-MM-DD)
3. time (when surface water was sampled) in UTC (HH:MM)
4. latitude (water sampling location)
5. longitude (water sampling location)
6. water temperature (mean) (°C)
7. water temperature (standard deviation) (°C)
8. salinity (psu)
9. concentration of chlorophyll a (mean) (µg/L)
10. concentration of chlorophyll a (standard deviation) (µg/L)
11. DOC (mean) (µM C)
12. DOC (standard deviation) (µM C)
13. DON (mean) (µM N)
14. DON (standard deviation) (µM N)
15. POC (mean) (µg C/L)
16. POC (standard deviation) (µg C/L)
17. PON (mean) (µg N/L)
18. PON (standard deviation) (µg N/L)
19. abundance of pico-nanoplankton (cells/ml)
20. abundance of bacteria (cells/ml)
21. abundance of heterotrophic nanoplankton (cells/ml)

The last two rows in the data table represent water from the filtered seawater experiment, which used a combination of water collected on 2018-09-12 at 10:00 and on 2018-09-13 at 10:00. The data values for the filtered feawater experiment represent measurements from the combination of water collected on these two dates. Moreover, POC, PON and cell abundance measurements were not made for the filtered seawater experiment. The value -999 is used to represent no measurement.

Comments

DOC and DON were analyzed using a Shimadzu TOC-L system equipped with TNM-L for N detection. Chlorophyll samples were collected on Whatman GF/F filters, extracted in 90% acetone, and analyzed using standard fluorometric methods. POC and PON samples were filtered on precombusted (450 °C, 4 h) Whatman GF/F filters and frozen prior to analysis on a Costech Analytical Technologies ECS 4010 elemental analyzer. Salinity was determined from a calibrated Sea-Bird SBE 9 CTD (Bellevue, Washington) with a 24-bottle rosette on board the I/B Oden. Data from the down-casts were processed using the Seasave software (version 7.26.7.107). A hand-held salinity meter was used for discrete samples (Oakton, model SALT 6+).

The abundance of phytoplankton was also quantified in the water samples via flow cytometry. Bacterial cells were stained using the DNA stain SYBRGreen I (Thermofisher Scientific) prior to analysis. Flow cytometry was used to enumerate nanoplankton/picoplankton, bacteria, and heterotrophic nanoplankton.

The marine aerosol reference tank experiments were carried out during the Arctic Ocean 2018 expedition on board the Swedish icebreaker Oden, which was made in collaboration between Sweden and the US National Science Foundation (NSF) and organized by the Swedish Polar Research Secretariat.

The ship track with latitude and longitude information can be found in the Navigation, meteorological and surface seawater data from the Arctic Ocean 2018 expedition data set.