January 2017:

Working group members Simon Clegg, Andrew Dickson, and Heather Benway have been awarded funding for a 3 year project “A Thermodynamic Chemical Speciation Model for the Oceans, Seas, and Estuaries“. This project, supported by Natural Environment Research Council of the UK and the National Science Foundation (USA), will help achieve several of the goals of the Working Group. The initial focus of the project will be measurements and modelling the properties of the buffers that are used to calibrate measurements of the pH of seawater.

The project will start in November 2017. Progress will be described on the Activities pages of this site.

September 2016:

Our article ‘Towards a quality-controlled and accessible Pitzer model for seawater and related systems‘ (Frontiers in Marine Science 3, art. 139, 2016; https://doi.org/10.3389/fmars.2016.00139) has been published. The authors are Working Group members David R. Turner, Eric P. Achterberg, Chen-Tung A. Chen, Simon L. Clegg, Vanessa Hatje, Maria Maldonado, Sylvia G. Sander, Constant M. van den Berg, and Mona Wells.

June 2016:

The thermodynamic data upon which Pitzer chemical speciation models are based remain incomplete for some major and minor components of seawater, especially at temperatures other than 298.15 K. In this document we make recommendations for new measurements of thermodynamic properties, in order of their importance for the calculation of pH (on both total and free scales), and calcite or aragonite saturation.