Lateral fluxes of carbon and nutrients from land to the coastal ocean

Marjorie Friedrichs, Virginia Institute of Marine Science, marjy@vims.edu (Presenter)
Wei-Jun Cai, University of Delaware, wcai@udel.edu
Eileen Hofmann, Old Dominion University, hofmann@ccpo.odu.edu
Steven Lohrenz, University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, slohrenz@umassd.edu
Raymond Najjar, The Pennsylvania State University, rgn1@psu.edu
Hanqin Tian, Auburn University, tianhan@auburn.edu

The coastal boundary between land and ocean represents a small portion of the surface area of the earth, yet plays a major role in global carbon and nutrient cycling. The most productive marine ecosystems are located in coastal waters, which are, not coincidentally, adjacent to regions of highest human population density. As a result, these regions are particularly susceptible to anthropogenic impacts, such as those resulting from land cover and land use change. At the same time, changes in climate are posing significant stress on these regions, as witnessed by increasing temperatures, atmospheric CO2 and sea levels. Until recently, however, biogeochemical fluxes across the land-ocean boundary have been largely overlooked in terms of study on continental and global scales, primarily because of the challenges associated with addressing the extreme heterogeneity between adjacent systems, and the difficulties associated with developing global scale models capable of resolving the strong variability of processes occurring on relatively small time and space scales along the land-ocean interface. Over the past decade, however, NASA has supported a vast array of interdisciplinary research focused on studying the connections between these terrestrial and marine ecosystems, and the fluxes of carbon and nutrients from upstream landscapes to the coastal ocean. In this talk we will review these recent efforts, highlighting how NASA-supported research has used a combination of coupled interdisciplinary terrestrial-ocean models, satellite observations and in situ data to quantify the flux of inorganic/organic carbon and nutrients from terrestrial systems to the coastal ocean.

Presentation: 2015_Apr20_PM_Friedrichs_13.pdf (10717k)

Presentation Type:  Plenary Talk

Session:  Theme 2: Landscapes to coasts: understanding Earth system connections

Presentation Time:  Mon 2:52 PM  (22 minutes)