Limnology & Oceanography: Methods
Abstract
Dissolved gas concentrations in surface waters can have sharp gradients across marine and freshwater environments, which often prove challenging to capture with analytical measurement. Collecting discrete samples for laboratory analysis provides accurate results, but suffers from poor spatial resolution. To overcome this limitation, water equilibrators and gas membrane contactors (GMCs) have been used for the automated underway measurement of dissolved gas concentrations in surface water. However, while water equilibrators can provide continuous measurements, their analytical response times to changes in surface water concentration can be slow, lasting tens of minutes. This leads to spatial imprecisions in the dissolved gas concentration data. Conversely, while GMCs have proven to have much faster analytical response times, often lasting only a few minutes or less, they suffer from poor accuracy and thus require routine calibration. This paper presents an analytical system for the high accuracy and high precision spatial mapping of dissolved methane concentration in surface waters. The system integrates a GMC with a cavity ringdown spectrometer (Picarro's G2201-i) for fast analytical response times, with a calibration method involving two Weiss-style equilibrators and discrete measurements in vials.