During this cruise, the fluxes of benzene and toluene were almost always from the ocean to the atmosphere. The cruise mean saturation (an indication of the thermodynamic forcing and direction of the flux, here a saturation above 100 % indicates outgassing) was 192 ± 121 % for benzene and 173 ± 106 % for toluene, while the cruise mean fluxes were 0.023 ± 0.030 µmol m -2 d -1 for benzene and 0.039 ± 0.036 µmol m -2 d -1 for toluene. There was a large range in the benzene and toluene fluxes, with a maximum of 0.358 µmol m -2 d -1 for benzene and 0.158 µmol m -2 d -1 for toluene. To put these emissions into context, the mean benzene and toluene fluxes out of the ocean were comparable (i.e. within 0.007 µmol m -2 d -1 ) to the mean isoprene flux measured during the same cruise . These benzene and toluene fluxes are also in the same order of magnitude (i.e. within 0.012 µmol m -2 d -1 ) as mean monoterpene fluxes reported from the northwest Atlantic . This illustrates that, on a molar per area basis, benzene and toluene fluxes rival emissions by other hitherto better known marine biological gases. We observe lower median fluxes of benzene (0.012 µmol m -2 d -1 ) and toluene (0.034 µmol m -2 d -1 ) compared to the mean, which illustrates skewedness of the data distribution and larger outgassing events influencing the mean. Rocco et al. ( ) calculated emissions of 1.3 µmol m -2 d -1 (= 1.2 ng m -2 s -1 ) benzene and 3.5 µmol m -2 d -1 (= 3.7 ng m -2 s -1 ) toluene. This is more than sixty times larger than our mean and 3 (benzene) and 22 (toluene) times larger than our highest outgassing fluxes. It is worth noting that the flux estimates from Rocco et al. are based on three nights only and were calculated using the nocturnal accumulation method. This method assumes that night-time losses from reaction with OH are negligible and that ocean emissions accumulate overnight in a well-mixed marine boundary layer. Any night-time increase (which have only been detected reliably for three nights in their works ) is assumed to be due to ocean outgassing (which is not necessarily a given for atmospheric benzene and toluene due to the existence of continental sources of these compounds). This method can only be applied to nights when there was substantial outgassing, which could lead to an overestimate of the true mean flux. The nocturnal accumulation method has thus far only been used for DMS and methanethiol , and only validated for DMS, two gases that are well known to be consistently supersaturated in the ocean and have essentially only marine sources.