Dilution stacks on the wind
Witte, Zappa and McGillis, at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and the University of Notre Dame, set a rain-aware flux against the wind-only baseline. Rain raised that uptake by 13.6 per cent. About two-thirds of the added carbon came from dilution, as fresher surface water repartitions the carbonate system. Wet deposition, counted on its own, added about 3.8 per cent. An earlier ceiling stood at 7.7 per cent; this analysis doubles it.[1]
The 10 per cent the budgets leave out
Carbon observations at the surface already include about 30 per cent of the dilution effect. Budgets that never write rain in place the ocean sink about 10 per cent low, with a 5 per cent spread. The opening is not a new smokestack. It is whether the sea surface during rain enters the ledger.[1]
The measurement that binds is salinity and carbon in the surface film while rain is falling and just after. Dilution, not the wind term, carries most of the extra uptake. If the dilution model freshens that film more than the ocean does, the 10 per cent gap does not stay this large.[1]
The term the ledger still lacks
The signal to watch is a global carbon budget that writes rain dilution into the ocean term and moves the sink by about 10 per cent. Until that line is entered, another wind-only gas-transfer formula leaves the gap where it is.[1]