Since late September 2021, we are working as team members of of an exciting new project lead by the Plymouth Marine Laboratory (PML) and funded by the European Space Agency (ESA): PRIMary productivity in Upwelling Systems (PRIMUS). The team includes scientists across six international institutes from UK, Portugal, Spain and South Africa (PML, MARE/FC.ID, CSIC, IPMA, ULPGC, CSIR) working together on the project.
Sentinel-3 is a satellite equipped with a suite of state-of-the-art instruments by the European Space Agency (ESA) for systematically measuring the characteristics of the Earth’s oceans, land, ice and atmosphere to monitoring and understanding large-scale global dynamics, crucial to inform and forecast on the ocean and weather. The unique 300 m resolution of the ESA MERIS and ESA/Copernicus Sentinel 3 OLCI instruments give an view of the distribution of Chl-a and offer the unprecedented potential to estimate NPP within the main Galician rias and on the adjacent continental shelf. To our knowledge satellite derived estimation of NPP has never been attempted at this resolution. PRIMUS will contribute to fill this gap by generating and validating a “4DAtlantic Experimental Dataset” of EO-based Atlantic EBUS data, based on recent data from Sentinel-3.
Why are EBUS so important?
Eastern Boundary Upwelling Systems, or EBUS, are some of the most productive marine ecosystems in the modern ocean which,despite occupying a very small portion of the global ocean volume (< 1%), roduce up to 10% of the global marine net primary production (NPP) and support around 25% of the total worldwide fisheries. While playing such a crucial role in the cycling of carbon, oxygen, and nutrients in the global ocean, EBUS are also susceptible to environmental threats from human pressure and climate change.
Based on very high-quality Earth Observation (EO) data combined with in-situ observations and ocean circulation modelling, the aim of PRIMUS is to crucially contribute to advance our existing understanding of net primary productivity (NPP) in Atlantic EBUS, while creating and implementing adaptive management strategies to deal with the ecological and socio-economic effects of such threats.
This is a map of the global annual primary production (PP) based on mean photosynthesis versus irradiance (P-I) parameters, for the period of 1998-2018 (image: Kulk et al., 2020).
How will CHASE contribute?
At PRIMUS, we will be leading Science Case 8, which aims at comparing one year of sediment trap flux data produced by mineralising phytoplankton (including coccolithophores) in the Canary Current system (off Mauritania) with PRMUS NPP data, using both standard and Lagrangian frameworks. With this study, we hope to advance existing understanding on the role of species-specific carbonate production in influencing the biological carbon pumps in the context of ocean warming. And since we will be looking at data collected right underneath the main Saharan plume originating from Africa (sediment trap sites M1 at 12ºN 23ºW, and CB at 21ºN 20ºW), we will take this opportunity to attempt at distinguishing the effects of upwelling- from dust-driven primary production in this EBUS region.