The timing and the magnitude of spring phytoplankton blooms and their relationship with physical forcing in the central Yellow Sea in 2009

Abstract

The development of phytoplankton bloom and its association with physical forcing is examined through an interdisciplinary field-work conducted in the vicinity of the central trough of the southern Yellow Sea during March–April 2009, with the aid of a surface Lagrangian drifter deployed at the bloom site. Bloom patches were detected using an empirical value and two of them were traced by the drifter for a period of several days respectively. Both of them appears as thin-layer subsurface chlorophyll a maximum (SCM) throughout the tracing, although their dominant phytoplankton species are not identical at all. The magnitude as well as the onset of these two blooms is different from each other, but both found to be relevant to local oceanic and meteorological conditions. Both of them demonstrate that the changes in the stability of hydrographical structure, especially at layers around the SCM, take a substantial role in triggering or terminating the blooming processes. Those changes in meteorological conditions, like wind speed and directions, solar radiation, are short and cause daily or synoptic scale variations in phytoplankton concentrations, but the frequency of northerly wind events predating the bloom season has a positive effect on the occurrence of spring blooms. The horizontal advection is another contributing factor indicated by the drifter which accounts for the bloom extinction at the station B20. In addition, due to the weak orbital horizontal movement, the bloom above the central trough persists longer and larger.