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Seminar Details

Oceanic turbulence and highly intermittent phytoplankton dynamics

Date

07/12/2017

Lecturers

Prof. Hidekatsu Yamazaki - Tokyo University of Marine Science and Technology

Abstract

Phytoplankton requires both light and nutrient, thus requires to stay in the upper ocean where turbulence stirs water column. Turbulence mixes oceanic properties, such as salinity and temperature. How does it mix phytoplankton? How do they distribute in space? How small scale do we need to resolve the microscale distribution? I have developed two types of fluorescence probe, LED (2 cm resolution) and laser (2 mm resolution). I have found that the LED data are significantly different from the laser data that exhibit highly intermittent features. The local signals are considerably stronger than the spatially average signal. I also mounted an optic system on the microstructure profiler TurboMAP-L to identify the source of intermittent fluorescence signals and found the strong signals came from marine aggregates. From ten different field campaigns I compiled the average size of aggregate and the average rate of kinetic energy dissipation rate and found they are positively correlated. The implications of the field data are presented in my talk.

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