The overlooked tropical oceanic CO2 sink Ibanhez, J. S. P. Araujo, M. /Lefèvre, Nathalie The intense rainfall in the tropical Atlantic spatially overlaps with the spread of the Amazon plume. Based on remote-sensed sea surface salinity and rainfall, we removed the contribution of rainfall to the apparent Amazon plume area, thus refining the quantification of its extension (0.84 +/- 0.06 x 10(6) km(2) to 0.89 +/- 0.06 x 10(6) km(2)). Despite the previous overestimation of the Amazon plume area due to the influence of rainfall (>16%), our calculated annual CO2 flux based on rainfall-corrected sea surface CO2 fugacity confirms that the Amazon River plume is an atmospheric CO2 sink of global importance (-7.61 +/- 1.01 to -7.85 +/- 1.02 Tg C yr(-1)). Yet we show that current sea-air CO2 flux assessments for the tropical Atlantic could be overestimated in about 10% by neglecting the CO2 sink associated to the Amazon plume. Thus, including the Amazon plume, the sea-air CO2 exchange for the tropical Atlantic is estimated to be 81.1 +/- 1.1 to 81.5 +/- 1.1 Tg C yr(-1). 2016 text https://www.documentation.ird.fr/hor/fdi:010066978 fdi:010066978 Ibanhez J. S. P., Araujo M., Lefèvre Nathalie. The overlooked tropical oceanic CO2 sink. 2016, 43 (8), 3804-3812 EN ATLANTIQUE OUEST ZONE TROPICAL AMAZONE