From Surface Chlorophyll a to Phytoplankton Community Composition in Oceanic Waters

摘要

The objective of the present study is to examine the potential of using the near-surface total chlorophyll a concentration, as it can be derived from ocean color observation, to infer the column-integrated and the vertical distribution of the phytoplanktonic biomass, both in a quantitative way and in a qualitative way (i.e., in terms of community structure). Within this context, a large HPLC (High Performance Liquid Chromatography) pigment database has been analyzed. It includes 2419 vertical pigment profiles, all sampled in Case-1 waters with various trophic states. The relationships between concentration and the total chlorophyll a vertical distribution, as previously derived by Morel and Berthon (1989), are fully confirmed, as the present results coincide with the previous ones. This agreement allows to go further, namely to examine the possibility of extracting relationships between concentration and the vertical composition of the algal assemblages.