Modelling an alkenone-like proxy record in the NW African upwelling
Résumé
A regional biogeochemical model is applied to the NW African coastal upwelling between 19° N and 27° N to investigate how a water temperature proxy is produced at the sea surface and recorded in the slope sediments. The biological model has two phytoplankton groups, to distinguish an alkenone producer group (considered as coccolithophores) from other phytoplankton. The Regional Ocean Modelling System (ROMS) is used to simulate the ocean circulation, and takes advantage of the Adaptive Grid Refinement in Fortran (AGRIF) package to set up an embedded griding system. The results show that the alkenone-like temperature records in the sediments are between 1.1 and 2.1°C colder compared to the annual mean SSTs. Despite the seasonality of the coccolithophorid production, this temperature difference is not mainly due to a seasonal bias, nor to the lateral advection of phytoplankton and phytodetritus from the cold water domain to most offshore locations, but to the production depth of the coccolithophores. If core-top sediment alkenone-derived temperatures are effectively recording the annual mean SSTs, the quantitative alkenone production in the water column must be inhomogeneous among the coccolithophore population and depend on physiological factors (growth rate, nutrient stress).
Origine : Accord explicite pour ce dépôt