Oxygen exchange flux between sediment and water in an intertidal sandflat, measured in situ by the eddy-correlation method

Abstract

High temporal-resolution fluctuations in oxygen concentration and vertical velocity were measured over an intertidal sandflat (water depth < 69 cm) using an oxygen microelectrode and an acoustic Doppler velocimeter, in order to estimate oxygen flux across the sediment-water interface using the eddy-correlation method. The effect of flux estimate procedures, including noise removal and extraction of fluctuating components, was investigated. The estimated oxygen effluxes from the sediment ranged from -3.2 to 6.6 mmol O 2 m-2 h-1 in the light and from -14.5 to -6.6 mmol O2 m-2 h-1 in the dark. The oxygen-uptake fluxes in the dark were markedly higher than those measured by a conventional enclosure technique. High-frequency turbulence and/or noise (> 5 Hz) observed in the vertical velocity and oxygen concentration data made little contribution to the total oxygen flux (0 to 7%). However, trends (steady change over a longer time scale) caused significant artifacts in the estimated fluxes for several cases. Thus, removal of trends from raw time-series data is recommended. The co-spectrum of the fluctuating components of vertical velocity and oxygen concentration revealed that the oxygen flux at a frequency band between 0.3 and 1.4 Hz (at a period from 0.7 to 3.3 s) was a major contributor to the total oxygen flux. This frequency was consistent with the dominant frequency of vertical velocity, indicating that transport and exchange of porewater and overlying water by wind-induced waves may be crucial processes to dissolved oxygen flux between permeable sandy sediments and shallow waters. © Inter-Research 2006.