Correction for Lebrato et al., Global variability in seawater Mg:Ca and Sr:Ca ratios in the modern ocean

Abstract

The authors wish to note the following: “This study’s seawater Sr:Ca values were systematically low as a consequence of normalization to another published low value for the International Association for the Physical Sciences of the Oceans (IAPSO) (1). IAPSO has been used at the Ocean Drilling Program, Texas A&M University (ODP-TAMU) (http://www-odp.tamu.edu/), and is still being used as the primary standard for elemental composition of seawater/interstitial water. Consequently, our seawater value of Sr:Ca = 8.28 mmol:mol was systematically low by approx. 3.70%, if we accept seawater Sr:Ca 8.60 mmol:mol as the recommended value for IAPSO North Atlantic surface water salinity standard. The uncertainty budget should be expanded including the uncertainty of IAPSO composition. The largest contribution to expanded uncertainty of our data comes from the uncertainty of the IAPSO reference composition, which is 3.29% using all published values. This will result in 3.30% (1 SD) expanded uncertainty for seawater Sr:Ca (and 0.5%, for seawater Mg:Ca) of the entire data set with respect to accuracy. We have corrected all seawater Sr:Ca values with a factor of 1.0243 in all our tables (e.g., SI Appendix, Table S1 averages) and in the figures (Fig. 4, Fig. 5), where a ratio was used. Note that the seawater Sr:Ca % changes are small, thus changes are hardly noticeable on large displays (e.g., Figures), but they can be seen in the tables and averages/SD calculations. Seawater Sr:Ca ratios are also corrected in the main text where relevant