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      Seasonal and Long-Term Variability of the Mixed Layer Depth and its Influence on Ocean Productivity in the Spanish Gulf of Cádiz and Mediterranean Sea

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          Abstract

          The warming of the surface ocean is expected to increase the stratification of the upper water column. This would decrease the efficiency of the wind-induced mixing, reducing the nutrient supply to the euphotic layer and the productivity of the oceans. Climatic projections show that the Mediterranean Sea will experience a strong warming and salting along the twenty first century. Nevertheless, very few works have found and quantified changes in the water column stratification of the Western Mediterranean. In this work, we obtain time series of Mixed Layer Depth (MLD) along the Spanish Mediterranean waters and the Gulf of Cádiz, using periodic CTD profiles collected under the umbrella of the Ocean Observing system of the Instituto Español de Oceanografía (IEO-CSIC). The length of the time series analyzed is variable, depending on the geographical area, but in some cases these time series extend from the beginning of the 1990s decade. Our results show that at present, no statistically significant changes can be detected. These results are confirmed by the analysis of MLD time series obtained from Argo profilers. Some of the meteorological factors that could affect the water column stratification (wind intensity and precipitation rates) did not experience significant changes for the 1990-2021 period, neither were observed long-term changes in the chlorophyll concentration. The hypothesis proposed to explain this lack of trends, is that the salinity increase of the surface waters has compensated for the warming, and consequently, the density of the upper layer of the Western Mediterranean (WMED) has remained constant. As the wind intensity has not experienced significant trends, the stratification of the Spanish Mediterranean waters and those of the Gulf of Cádiz would have not been affected. Nevertheless, we do not discard that our results are a consequence of the short length of the available time series and the large variance of the variables analyzed, evidencing the importance of the maintenance of the ocean monitoring programs.

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          Climate-driven trends in contemporary ocean productivity.

          Contributing roughly half of the biosphere's net primary production (NPP), photosynthesis by oceanic phytoplankton is a vital link in the cycling of carbon between living and inorganic stocks. Each day, more than a hundred million tons of carbon in the form of CO2 are fixed into organic material by these ubiquitous, microscopic plants of the upper ocean, and each day a similar amount of organic carbon is transferred into marine ecosystems by sinking and grazing. The distribution of phytoplankton biomass and NPP is defined by the availability of light and nutrients (nitrogen, phosphate, iron). These growth-limiting factors are in turn regulated by physical processes of ocean circulation, mixed-layer dynamics, upwelling, atmospheric dust deposition, and the solar cycle. Satellite measurements of ocean colour provide a means of quantifying ocean productivity on a global scale and linking its variability to environmental factors. Here we describe global ocean NPP changes detected from space over the past decade. The period is dominated by an initial increase in NPP of 1,930 teragrams of carbon a year (Tg C yr(-1)), followed by a prolonged decrease averaging 190 Tg C yr(-1). These trends are driven by changes occurring in the expansive stratified low-latitude oceans and are tightly coupled to coincident climate variability. This link between the physical environment and ocean biology functions through changes in upper-ocean temperature and stratification, which influence the availability of nutrients for phytoplankton growth. The observed reductions in ocean productivity during the recent post-1999 warming period provide insight on how future climate change can alter marine food webs.
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            Ocean's least productive waters are expanding

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              Mixed layer depth over the global ocean: An examination of profile data and a profile-based climatology

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                Author and article information

                Journal
                Frontiers in Marine Science
                Front. Mar. Sci.
                Frontiers Media SA
                2296-7745
                June 10 2022
                June 10 2022
                : 9
                Article
                10.3389/fmars.2022.901893
                d09dc306-3701-45a4-ac32-93955187f8bb
                © 2022

                Free to read

                https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

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