Abstract. Dry deposition at the Earth’s surface is an important sink of atmospheric ozone. Currently, dry deposition of ozone to the ocean surface in atmospheric chemistry models has the largest uncertainty compared to deposition to other surface types, with implications for global tropospheric ozone budget and associated radiative forcing. Most models assume that the dominant term of surface resistance in the parameterisation of ozone dry deposition velocity at the oceanic surface is constant. We present a consistent, process-based parameterisation scheme for air-sea exchange in which the surface resistance accounts for the simultaneous waterside processes of ozone solubility, molecular diffusion, turbulent transfer, and a first-order chemical reaction of ozone with dissolved iodide. The new scheme makes the following realistic assumptions: (a) the thickness of the top water layer is of the order of a reaction-diffusion length scale (a few micrometres) within which ozone loss is dominated by chemical reaction and the influence of waterside turbulent transfer is negligible; (b) in the water layer below, both chemical reaction and waterside turbulent transfer act together and are accounted for; and (c) iodide (hence chemical reactivity) is present through the depth of the oceanic mixing layer. The asymptotic behaviour of the new scheme is consistent with the known limits when either chemical reaction or turbulent transfer dominates. It has been incorporated into the ACCESS-UKCA global chemistry-climate model and the results are evaluated against dry deposition velocities from currently best available open-ocean measurements. In order to better quantify the global dry deposition loss and its interannual variability, the modelled 3-h ozone deposition velocities are combined with the 3-h MACC (Monitoring Atmospheric Composition and Climate) reanalysis ozone for the years 2003–2012. The resulting ozone dry deposition is found to be 98.4 ± 4.5 Tg O3 yr−1 for the ocean and 722.8 ± 20.9 O3 yr−1 globally. The new estimate of the ocean component is approximately a third of the current model estimates. This reduction corresponds to an approximately 20 % decrease in the total global ozone dry deposition, which is equivalent to an increase of approximately 5 % in the modelled tropospheric ozone burden and a similar increase in tropospheric ozone lifetime.
Evaluation and improvements of two community models in simulating dry deposition velocities for peroxyacetyl nitrate (PAN) over a coniferous forest