Primary production variability in the Mediterranean Sea from SeaWiFS data

摘要

Primary Production (PP) has been estimated in the Mediterranean Sea from SeaWiFS data for the years 1998-2001 adapting a model developed by Antoine et al. (1996) to Mediterranean conditions. The tuning is based on the use of a new large data set of chlorophyll profiles acquired during the last 10 years in the Mediterranean Sea. Moreover a new data set of cloud cover and temperature has been used and SeaWiFS derived chlorophyll has been estimated using a Mediterranean algorithm recently proposed by D'Ortenzio et al. (2002). Comparison between present model estimates, previous models estimates and in situ data gives satisfactory results and show that the adapted model better reproduces the PP seasonal trend of Mediterranean Sea. The application of the procedure to each pixel of single SeaWiFS images allows the creation of daily, weekly and monthly averaged estimates of depth-integrated PP.