Abstract
In the southwestern Sea of Okhotsk, a large spring phytoplankton bloom occurs after the sea ice melts. A suggested scenario is that sea ice with materials such as iron-containing sediment or ice algae is transported from the north and melted with release of them, inducing a prominent bloom. We hypothesize that sea ice containing materials that could enhance spring bloom originates from active coastal polynyas in the upstream region. To verify this hypothesis and identify which coastal areas generate sea ice that is further transported to the bloom area, we simulated the transport of sea ice produced in the coastal polynyas by a particle-tracking method. Sea ice production and drift velocity were derived from satellite microwave data. For regions near the coast, where ice drift data derived from the satellite are inaccurate, we combined ice drift data derived from the wind using the wind factor and the turning angle obtained from mooring data. Further, we used the apparent wind factor that expresses enhancement of the alongshore component of ice drift by the ocean current. The simulations suggest that most of the sea ice that melts in the western Kuril Basin originates from the Terpenia Bay and Sakhalin polynyas. The area where high net community production occurs after the sea ice melts corresponds well to the area where sea ice originating from these polynyas melts. The simulation of frazil ice suggests the importance of melt ice originating from the Terpenia Bay polynya with a higher rate of frazil ice production.
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Acknowledgements
The authors express their gratitude to Kyoko Kitagawa and Genta Mizuta for their support. This work was supported by Grants-in-Aid for Scientific Research (17H01157 and 20H05707) and Arctic Challenge for Sustainability II (ArCS II) from the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology in Japan. This work was also supported by a research fund for Global Change Observation Mission Water 1 (GCOM-W1) of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) (PI No. ER2GWF404 and ER3AMF424). The mooring data were obtained under the Joint Japanese –Russian–U.S. study of the Sea of Okhotsk (representative: M. Wakatsuchi) supported by the fund from Core Research for Environmental Science and Technology (CREST), Japanese Science and Technology Corporation. The NCP data were provided by Sachiko Kishi. The AMSR-E brightness temperature and ice concentration data were obtained from website of the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC), University of Colorado (https://nsidc.org/data/ae_l2a/versions/4; https://nsidc.org/data/ae_si12/versions/3). The AMSR2 data were obtained from by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency website (https://gportal.jaxa.jp/gpr/). The ECMWF ERA5 data were downloaded from the Copernicus Climate Change Service Climate Data Store (https://cds.climate.copernicus.eu/cdsapp#!/dataset/reanalysis-era5-single-levels). The figures were produced with the Generic Mapping Tools (GMT) and gnuplot.
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Kuga, M., Ohshima, K.I., Kimura, N. et al. Particle-tracking experiments of coastal-origin sea ice that could induce high biological productivity in the Sea of Okhotsk. J Oceanogr 79, 145–159 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10872-022-00670-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10872-022-00670-5