Chlorophyll bloom enhanced by a mesoscale eddy in the western South China Sea

Yongqiang CHEN, Dajun QIU, Peter CORNILLON, Meilin WU

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Front. Earth Sci. ›› DOI: 10.1007/s11707-022-0984-3
RESEARCH ARTICLE

Chlorophyll bloom enhanced by a mesoscale eddy in the western South China Sea

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Abstract

Remote sensing of ocean color is used to detect phytoplankton blooms and oceanic eddies. In this study, satellite remote sensing was used to detect an eddy-like phytoplankton bloom in the western South China Sea in early September, 2007. The eddy-like phytoplankton bloom formed in the middle of August, before the formation of a cyclonic eddy. The time series reveals a lag period of about 1 week between maximum chlorophyll (Chl a) and maximum eddy intensity. This lag may have been related to the Mekong River discharge and its subsequent mixing by the cyclonic eddy. The spatial distribution of the bloom was characterized by a jet of high Chl a. Our data provide evidence that a significant proportion of south-westerly monsoon driven nutrients are used by phytoplankton. We also determined that phytoplankton blooms may support the large-scale advective spreading of high biomass waters to the open ocean by large surface currents. These biomass rich waters are probably important in the food chain dynamics of the outer south-eastern shelf and the coral islands or atolls in the open ocean.

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Keywords

cyclonic eddy / chlorophyll a / western South China Sea / remote sensing / phytoplankton

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Yongqiang CHEN, Dajun QIU, Peter CORNILLON, Meilin WU. Chlorophyll bloom enhanced by a mesoscale eddy in the western South China Sea. Front. Earth Sci., https://doi.org/10.1007/s11707-022-0984-3

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Acknowledgments

The present research was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 31971480, 41406186, and 41406130), Key Special Project for Introduced Talents Team of Southern Marine Science and Engineering Guangdong Laboratory (Guangzhou) (Nos. GML2019ZD0303, and GML2019ZD0405) and Innovation Academy of South China Sea Ecology and Environmental Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences (Nos. ISEE2019ZR02 and ISEE2018ZD02). NASA’s Ocean Color Working group provided the MODIS data. NASA Ocean Vector Winds Science Team provided the QuikScat wind-vector data. Analyses and visualizations used in this paper were produced with the Giovanni online data system, developed and maintained by the NASA GES DISC.

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