Elsevier

Journal of Marine Systems

Volumes 109–110, January 2013, Pages 129-137
Journal of Marine Systems

A comparison between phytoplankton community structures derived from a global 3D ecosystem model and satellite observation

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jmarsys.2012.01.009Get rights and content

Abstract

Phytoplankton functional types (PFTs) derived from a global 3D marine ecosystem model, MEM-OU, are compared with those observed by satellite. The climatological field of the large phytoplankton (diatoms) and small phytoplankton (nano- and picoplankton) showed the model and satellite observation generally agrees in their spatial distribution but showed some biases in the equatorial oceans and higher latitudes. Grid-by-grid correlation derived from the time series of the model and satellite observation showed a significant dependence on latitude, and it was found that lower (higher) correlation coefficients were not necessarily found in the regions where higher (lower) bias was found. Spatial PCA analysis of monthly climatology of PFTs showed that a major spatial pattern of PFTs results from a steady state distribution superimposed by regional seasonal distribution. The model and the satellite observation both showed such seasonality, but we found that the model remarkably showed strong seasonality in the Southern Oceans and the equatorial oceans. The wavelet pattern comparison analysis was applied to quantify the spatial scale(s) at which the agreement in spatial distributions of PFTs can be obtained. The objective skill score determined using the pattern matching/mismatching analysis by the wavelet showed that the model has a skill to represent observed spatial patterns at horizontal scales over 1800 km (i.e. basin and global scale). The agreement is found even at the spatial scales down to 200 km (i.e. meso-scales), when the pigment biomass of the PFTs at the scales is relatively small. Our comparison enabled an objective and quantitative examination of the validity and weakness of the model by clarifying the spatial scale(s) to which the present PFT model has skill, and adds a value on conventional comparison procedure based on univariate statistics.

Introduction

Due to the geographically large spatial scale of the oceans and the inter-disciplinary nature of marine ecosystems, there is an inherent necessity for an integrated analysis using in situ and satellite observations and modeling in order to understand, represent and forecast processes involved in the global marine ecosystems. In such a circumstance, one of the strategies to achieve a scientific objective may be to scale up in situ observation to satellite observation in order to increase a spatial coverage and temporal resolution of the observation, and then apply them to modeling (e.g. re-analysis), which is expected to give a better understanding of a temporally continuous three-dimensional structure of the marine ecosystems and its variability in the future environment.

A large amount of global in situ data of phytoplankton, i.e. primary producers in the marine ecosystems, has been obtained through pigment biomass measurements. Taking advantage of the availability of the global data, O'Reilly et al. (1998) scaled up the in situ observations of the pigment biomass to satellite observations, which enormously improved the spatial coverage and temporal frequency of data sampling (approximately 8 days of observations covers the majority of the globe). Furthermore, the global satellite observations of phytoplankton have been extended to obtain fractional contributions of different phytoplankton functional types (PFTs) to the pigment biomass for a better understanding of their biogeochemical and ecological functions in the oceans (e.g. Bracher et al., 2009, Brewin et al., 2010, Devred et al., 2006, Kostadinov et al., 2010, Hirata et al., 2011, Uitz et al., 2006).

In parallel, marine biogeochemical–ecosystem models, which explicitly represent physiology of marine organisms and ecosystem processes as well as emergent properties such as a composition of the phytoplankton community, have also been advanced: e.g. NEMURO (Aita et al., 2007, Hashioka et al., 2009), PlankTOM-5 (Le Quéré et al., 2005, Le Quéré and Pesant, 2008), BEC (Doney et al., 2001, Moore et al., 2002), PISCES (Aumont and Bopp, 2006), MEM-OU (Shigemitsu et al., submitted for publication). These biogeochemical–ecosystem models are coupled with the ocean general circulation models (OGCM), and are able to compute a realistic distribution of the PFTs. Thus, it is now possible to compare, not only Chlorophyll-a pigment biomass of the total phytoplankton community but also fractional pigment biomass of each PFT derived from the modeling and the satellite observation, towards applications to a global analysis of detailed marine ecosystems.

Comparisons between modeling and observations have been done in terms of primary productivity, chlorophyll-a, chemical species etc. (e.g. Doney et al., 2009, Friedrichs et al., 2009). In these analyses, standard univariate metrics such as correlation coefficient, the root mean square error, bias etc. have been used to assess a model skill. While these are useful metrics for grid-by-grid comparison for a time series, spatial scales at which the PFTs derived from the model and the observations agree at a certain time step are not addressed. Vichi et al. (2011) used a multi-dimensional scaling approach to compare biogeochemical provinces and spatial distribution, which can be applied to the PFTs too. However, the spatial scales agreed between model and observation was not quantified. As a result, the quantification of “spatial pattern matching” tends to remain unresolved in marine ecosystem model–observation comparisons, and an assessment of a spatial similarity between model and observation still relies on visual and subjective comparison. Here, we attempt to bridge the univariate and pattern comparisons using the PFTs derived from modeling and satellite observation to quantify the spatial similarity. We first derive conventional univariate statistical metrics. In addition, the spatial Principal Component Analysis (PCA) is performed to find major variability in spatial pattern of the PFTs and then a two-dimensional wavelet method is used to quantify the spatial scale(s) at which the modeled PFTs agree to the satellite PFTs, to see that our analysis presented here provide a novel and significant value on conventional comparisons between the model and satellite observation.

Section snippets

Model data

A new Marine Ecosystem Model (called MEM-OU) based on a marine biogeochemical model has been developed (Shigemitsu et al., submitted for publication) with the aim of a better representation of biogeochemical dependencies and phytoplankton physiology. The MEM-OU includes silica and dissolved and particulate iron cycles (Fig. 1), notably incorporating the optimum nutrient uptake kinetics (Smith and Yamanaka, 2007). Phytoplankton is represented by two phytoplankton types in the MEM-OU; large

Methodology

Spatial distributions of pigment biomass of PL and PS derived from the model and the satellite, as well as of the sum of PL and PS (= Tchla), are compared by bias assessment, correlation statistics, the principal component analysis (PCA) and the two-dimensional Harr wavelet analysis (2D-WA). Due to a limitation in the satellite observation at high latitudes in winter, only 47°S to 47°N is considered to match up grids between model and satellite data for the comparison.

Since our primary interest

Climatological mean

Fig. 3 shows a climatological pigment biomass of Tchla, PL and PS over 1998–2007 derived from a satellite observation and model hindcast. The satellite observation exhibits relatively high pigment biomass at higher latitudes for Tchla, PL and PS (> 0.5 mg m 3) but relatively low in the subtropical gyres (< 0.2 mg m 3), which is consistent with a decadal in situ observation (Aiken et al., 2009). In the satellite Tchla and PS, the Equatorial Pacific also show an elevated pigment biomass (> 0.2 mg m 3) due

Discussion

Using the standardized data derived from the model and the satellite, the wavelet analysis presented here quantitatively identified spatial scales where the model has skill to represent spatial distributions of Tchla, PL and PS. The information lost during the standardization (e.g. such as the bias), has to be assessed by other means (see Fig. 4). However a spatial distribution of the bias in relative unit is still considered in the wavelet analysis. Thus, the wavelet analysis does not provide

Summary and conclusions

The marine ecosystem model, MEM-OU, was applied to a three dimensional scale by coupling an OGCM, and climatological fields of the PFTs obtained from the model were compared with those from the satellite observation. Spatial distribution of phytoplankton communities generally agree between model and satellite except for the equatorial ocean where relatively larger bias was found. Nonetheless, the model clearly captured a dominant distribution of PFTs at the global scale across the oceans. The

Acknowledgment

This work was financially supported by the JSPS Institutional Program for Young Researcher Overseas Visits, Grant-in-Aid for Young Scientist (Start-up) and JAXA Global Observation Mission - Climate project. A development of the ecosystem model was funded by the Japan Science Technology Agency (JST) under Core Research for Evolution Science and Technology program (CREST).

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