Publication Date:
2022-05-26
Description:
Author Posting. © American Geophysical Union, 2016. This article is posted here by permission of American Geophysical Union for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Geophysical Research Letters 43 (2016): 2086–2093, doi:10.1002/2016GL067937.
Description:
Phytoplankton in Antarctic coastal polynyas has a temporally short yet spatially variant growth window constrained by ice cover and day length. Using 18-year satellite measurements (1997–2015) of sea ice and chlorophyll concentrations, we assessed the synchronicity between the spring phytoplankton bloom and light availability, taking into account the ice cover and the incident solar irradiance, for 50 circum-Antarctic coastal polynyas. The synchronicity was strong (i.e., earlier ice-adjusted light onset leads to earlier bloom and vice versa) in most of the western Antarctic polynyas but weak in a majority of the eastern Antarctic polynyas. The west-east asymmetry is related to sea ice production rate: the formation of many eastern Antarctic polynyas is associated with strong katabatic wind and high sea ice production rate, leading to stronger water column mixing that could damp phytoplankton blooms and weaken the synchronicity.
Description:
This research was funded by NASA (grant NNX14AH74G) and U.S. National Science Foundation (grant PLR-1341558).
Description:
2016-09-05
Keywords:
Phenology
;
Synchronicity
;
Phytoplankton
;
Ice retreat
;
Antarctic polynya
Repository Name:
Woods Hole Open Access Server
Type:
Article
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