Matthew
Oliver, University of Delaware, moliver@udel.edu
(Presenting)
Andrew
Irwin, Mt. Allison University, airwin@mta.ca
Oscar
Schofield, Rutgers University, oscar@imcs.rutgers.edu
Paul
Falkowski, Rutgers University, falko@imcs.rutgers.edu
Biogeographic provinces provide useful categories for comparing and contrasting important ocean processes such as primary production, carbon flux, and species distribution and diversity. Climatological provinces have been identified using a priori expert knowledge. Discerning temporal trends and fine scale structures require objective automatic methods. We use objective classification on global remote sensing data to automatically produce time and space resolved province distributions. Seasonal patterns in province geography reflect well known ocean processes. Our predictions of province boundaries are verified by in-situ ship track data. Finally, province distributions in the equatorial Pacific correlate well with ENSO indexes.
NASA Carbon Cycle & Ecosystems Active Awards Represented by this Poster: