Net community production and export from Seaglider measurements in the North Atlantic after the spring bloom

Abstract

AbstractMean rates of net community production (NCP) and particulate organic carbon (POC) export were estimated from sensor measurements of dissolved oxygen (O2), chlorophyll fluorescence (chl F), and particulate backscatter (bbp700) collected from three Seagliders that surveyed a 20 × 20 km area in the North Atlantic subsequent to a large diatom bloom. Since the Seagliders sampled geographically fixed patterns, care was taken in the calculation of all terms applicable to the Eulerian reference frame, including local rate of change, vertical mixing, air‐sea exchange, and horizontal advection. Although similar studies of NCP in the open ocean have generally assumed advection to be insignificant, we have found that this term cannot be ignored when dealing with temporal scales of ≤1 month and/or spatial scales ≤20 km. The overlapping sampling pattern of the Seagliders was sufficiently rapid such that 4–5 day time scales observed in the O2 and POC data were adequately resolved and variations were not a consequence of aliasing spatial variability. During the study period, ratios of chlorophyll fluorescence‐to‐particulate backscatter (chl:bbp700) were lower than values encountered during the spring diatom bloom, suggesting the phytoplankton community was predominantly composed of smaller cells (picoplankton and nanoplankton) and/or coccolithophorids. Coupled budgets of oxygen and POC indicated a net community production of 1.0 mol C m−2 and carbon export of 0.6 mol C m−2, respectively, over a period of 23 days. Thus, the production and export of carbon that occurred over the month‐long experiment period was comparable to that encountered during the spring bloom.