2532 
F. Große et al.: Looking beyond stratification 
Biogeosciences, 13, 2511-2535, 2016 
www.biogeosciences.net/13/2511/2016/ 
Acknowledgements. We would like to thank Sonja van Leeuwen 
from Cefas for providing updated data on freshwater and nutri 
ent loads for the major rivers across Europe. We further thank 
Jerzy Bartnicki for providing atmospheric nitrogen deposition 
data from the European Monitoring and Evaluation Programme 
(EMEP). We thank Dilek Topcu and Uwe Brockmann from the 
University of Hamburg for providing the map of observed O2 
deficiency in the North Sea. Furthermore, we thank the editor 
Véronique Garçon and two anonymous referees for the valuable 
comments and constructive criticism, which helped to significantly 
improve the manuscript. The model simulation was conducted 
on Blizzard, the IBM Powerô mainframe at the German Climate 
Computing Centre (DKRZ) in Hamburg. The North Sea sampling 
in 2001, 2005 and 2008 was supported by the Dutch Science 
Foundation (NWO), CARBOOCEAN (EU-FP6) and the Royal 
Netherlands Institute for Sea Research (NIOZ). Cefas SmartBuoy 
data were collected under the UK Department for Environment, 
Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) contract ME3205 (Marine Ecosys 
tems Connections: essential indicators of healthy, productive and 
biologically diverse seas). Markus Kreus was partly financially 
supported by the Cluster of Excellence “CliSAP” (EXC177), 
University of Hamburg, funded by the German Science Foundation 
(DFG). This study was supported by the German Environmental 
Protection Agency (UBA) in Dessau, in the frame of the project 
“Implementation of Descriptor 5 Eutrophication to the MSFD”, 
SN: 3713225221. The publication costs were covered by Thomas 
Ludwig (Scientific Computing, University of Hamburg) and 
“CliSAP”. 
Edited by: V. Garçon 
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