Basin‐scale estimates of oceanic primary production by remote sensing: The North Atlantic

The estimation by remote sensing of annual primary production at ocean basin scales is illustrated for the Atlantic Ocean, using the monthly averaged Coastal Zone Color Scanner data for 1979. The principal supplementary data used were some 873 vertical profiles of chlorophyll and some 248 sets of parameters derived from photosynthesis‐light experiments. This information was used to parametrize the local algorithm for calculation of primary production in 12 subregions of the entire domain for each of the four seasons. Four different procedures were tested for calculation of primary production. These differed according to whether the autotrophic biomass distribution was uniform with depth and whether the irradiance was resolved with respect to wavelength: the spectral model with nonuniform biomass was considered as the benchmark for comparison against the other three models. At particular locations and times, the less complete models gave results that differed by as much as 50% from the benchmark. After integration to basin scale, vertically uniform models tended to underestimate primary production by about 20% compared to the nonuniform models. At large horizontal scale, the differences between spectral and nonspectral models were negligible, a result that was believed to follow from mutual compensation of underestimates and overestimates, according to the local biomass, in different parts of the domain. Calculation of primary production is highly sensitive to the algorithm used to retrieve the biomass. The linear correlation between biomass and estimated production was poor outside the tropics, suggesting caution against the indiscriminate use of biomass as a proxy variable for primary production. The annual primary production for the Atlantic between 20°S and 70°N was 9 ± 3 Gt yr −1 , higher than previous estimates made without reference to remotely sensed data. It is argued that the remote‐sensing method is the method of choice for calculation of primary production at the ocean basin scale.