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Pumping of nutrients to ocean surface waters by the action of propagating planetary waves

Nature volume 409, pages 597–600 (2001)Cite this article

Abstract

Primary productivity in the oceans is limited by the lack of nutrients in surface waters. These nutrients are mostly supplied from nutrient-rich subsurface waters through upwelling and vertical mixing1, but in the ocean gyres these mechanisms do not fully account for the observed productivity2. Recently, the upward pumping of nutrients, through the action of eddies, has been shown to account for the remainder of the primary productivity; however, these were regional studies which focused on mesoscale (100-km-scale) eddies3,4,5,6. Here we analyse remotely sensed chlorophyll and sea-surface-height data collected over two years and show that 1,000-km-scale planetary waves, which propagate in a westward direction in the oceans, are associated with about 5 to 20% of the observed variability in chlorophyll concentration (after low-frequency and large-scale variations are removed from the data). Enhanced primary production is the likely explanation for this observation, and if that is the case, propagating disturbances introduce nutrients to surface waters on a global scale—similar to the nutrient pumping that occurs within distinct eddies.

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Figure 1: Time–longitude diagrams of the bandpass-filtered SeaWiFS chlorophyll concentration data.
Figure 2: Wavenumber–frequency spectra of coherence between log(chlorophyll concentration) and sea surface height.
Figure 3: Propagation speeds of Chl and SSH anomalies.
Figure 4: Features associated with westward-propagating baroclinic disturbances make up ∼10% of the variance of the log(chlorophyll concentration) data.

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Acknowledgements

We thank the SeaWiFS team for chlorophyll data and AVISO for SSH data; we also thank D. Siegel, P. Polito and S. Schollaert for discussions and recommendations. This work was supported by NASA.

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  1. Graduate School of Oceanography, University of Rhode Island, S. Ferry Road, Narragansett, 02882, Rhode Island, USA

    B. Mete Uz, James A. Yoder & Vladimir Osychny

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  1. B. Mete Uz
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  3. Vladimir Osychny
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Correspondence to B. Mete Uz.

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Uz, B., Yoder, J. & Osychny, V. Pumping of nutrients to ocean surface waters by the action of propagating planetary waves. Nature 409, 597–600 (2001). https://doi.org/10.1038/35054527

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