Global ocean colour trends in biogeochemical provinces

Abstract

Satellite-derived ocean colour data provide continuous, daily measurements of global waters and are an essential tool for monitoring these waters in a changing climate. Merging observations from different satellite sensors is necessary for long-term and continuous climate research because the lifetime of these sensors is limited. A key issue in deriving long-term trends from merged ocean colour data is the inconsistency between the spatiotemporal coverage of the different sensor datasets that can lead to spurious multi-year fluctuations or trends in the time series. This study used the merged ocean colour satellite dataset produced by the Ocean Colour Climate Change Initiative (OC-CCI version 6.0) to infer global and local trends in optically active constituents. We applied a novel correction method to the OC-CCI dataset that results in a spatiotemporally consistent dataset, allowing the examination of long-term trends of optically active constituents with greater accuracy. We included sea surface temperature, salinity, and several climate oscillations in our analysis to gain insight into the underlying processes of derived trends. Our results indicate a significant increase in chlorophyll-a concentration in the polar waters, a decrease in chlorophyll-a concentration in some equatorial waters, and point to ocean darkening, predominantly in the polar waters, due to an increase in non-phytoplankton absorption. This study contributes to broader knowledge of global trends of optically active constituents and their relation to a changing environment.

Contrasted Trends in Chlorophyll‐a Satellite Products

“…These four products show very similar patterns as they are all partially based on the NASA R2018.0 and ESA reprocessing for their respective sensors, unlike Globcolour-GSM which derives Schl thanks to a specific semi-analytical ocean color model (Maritorena et al, 2002). Considering now the OC-CCI product which is widely used in the ocean color community (e.g., Fowler et al, 2023;van Oostende et al, 2023), a decreasing trend can be observed in the northern and equatorial Pacific Ocean, along the Pacific Intertropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ), the tropical Indian and northern Atlantic Oceans (Figure 1b). However, a significant positive trend of Schl appears in the northern hemisphere for higher latitudes than 40°N and in the Southern Ocean generally south of the Subtropical Front (Graham & Boer, 2013), as well as in the south-eastern Pacific.…”