Impact of Hurricane Sandy on CH ₄ Released from Vegetated and Unvegetated Wetland Microsites

Hurricane Sandy was one of the largest tropical storms to pass over the Atlantic basin, causing destruction along its path as it made landfall in Jamaica, Cuba, the Bahamas, and the United States [Tropical Cyclone Report: Hurricane Sandy; National Weather Service, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, 2012 (http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/data/tcr/AL182012-Sandy)]. Hurricane Sandy passed over the Meadowlands in the midst of our multiyear study on marsh CH ₄ dynamics, providing a unique opportunity to evaluate the effects of hurricanes on CH ₄ cycling within an estuarine marsh. We modeled dissolved CH ₄ distributions in wetland sediments from 2011 (Reid, M. C.; Tripathee, R.; Shäfer, K. V. R.; Jaffé, P. R. Tidal Marsh Methane dynamics: Difference in seasonal lags in emissions driven by storage in vegetated versus unvegetated sediments. J. Geophys. Res.: Biogeosci. 2013, 118, 1802-1813) to 2013 and estimated that Hurricane Sandy did not degas vegetated soils but degassed between 45 and 75% of the dissolved CH ₄ in unvegetated sediments. Hurricanes may regularly affect coastal wetland CH ₄ emissions globally, but because these wetland sediments do not store substantial dissolved CH ₄ late in the year, the degassing of these sediments by Hurricane Sandy did not play an important role in the annual carbon emissions from this marsh.