Marine NPP: Primary productivity models in the ocean

Background

Marine primary production is an important process in the global carbon cycle, and in studies of climate change. Models exist for computing marine primary production locally, regionally and globally. The use case for a marine application of the Earth System Data Cube (ESDC) can be built on a number of ongoing ESA projects: OC-CCI for chlorophyll product, the ESA PPP (PAR for primary production) for the PAR product at the sea surface, and MAPPS (Marine Primary Production Parameters from Space) project for assignment of model parameters.

Objectives

• To extend the Earth System Data Cube to include a number of additional products, mostly resulting from ESA projects, including
  • Chlorophyll fields from the ESA CCI Ocean project;
  • PAR (photosynthetically available radiation) at the sea surface from the ESA SEOM PPP project;
  • Photosynthesis-irradiance parameters (from ESA STSE MAPPS project); and
  • Archived information on chlorophyll-profile parameters
• To use the products to compute daily, water-column primary production at user-defined locations and time intervals.
• To estimate the required light-use efficiency parameters using the Data Analytic Toolkit (in cooperation with the use case on MDI)

User partners

• Plymouth Marine Laboratory, UK, as science partner.
• Other interested users form the Marine Science community

User community

• The user community embedded in the Group on Earth Observations’ “Oceans and Society: Blue Planet” initiative;
• Fisheries scientists, modellers, and managers.
• Aquaculture scientists, modellers and managers.
• Climate scientists, modellers and policy makers.
• Ocean ecosystem modellers
• Groups interested in global carbon cycling and carbon budgets.
• Biogeochemists

Outcome

• A versatile, user-friendly, primary production module within the data cube, with regional and, subsequently, global scope
• Report evaluating the newly implemented module.