Effects of storms on primary productivity and air-sea CO₂ exchange in the subarctic western North Pacific: a modeling study

M. Fujii (1) , Y. Yamanaka (2, 3)

1 Sustainability Governance Project
2 Graduate School of Environmental Science [Sapporo]
3 FRSGC - Frontier Research System for Global Change

Biogeochemical responses of the open ocean to storms and their feedback to climate are still poorly understood. Using a marine ecosystem model, we examine biogeochemical responses to the storms in the subarctic western North Pacific. The storms in summer through early autumn enhance primary production by wind-induced nutrient injections into the surface waters while the storms in the other seasons reduce primary production by intensifying light limitation on the phytoplankton growth due to vertical dilution of the phytoplankton. The two compensating effects diminish the storm-induced annual change of primary production to only 1%. On the contrary, the storms enhance the annual sea-to-air CO₂ efflux by no less than 34%, resulting from storm-induced strong winds. Our results suggest that previous studies using climatological wind and CO₂ data probably underestimated the sea-to-air CO₂ efflux during storms in the subarctic western North Pacific, and therefore, that continuous observations are required to reduce uncertainties in the global oceanic CO₂ uptake.

Domaines: Cosmologie et astrophysique extra-galactique [astro-ph.CO]; Astrophysique [astro-ph]; Interfaces continentales, environnement; Océan, Atmosphère; Sciences de la Terre

M. Fujii, Y. Yamanaka. Effects of storms on primary productivity and air-sea CO₂ exchange in the subarctic western North Pacific: a modeling study. Biogeosciences Discussions, 2008, 5 (1), pp.65-81. ⟨hal-00297957⟩