Primary Production

The pigment fields derived from ocean colour can be use to estimate primary production, which is the ecological term for the rate of photosynthesis by the green plants in an ecosystem. Photosynthesis is the process by which new biological tissue is formed, and provides the basis for sustenance of the entire marine food web.

To estimate primary production we need, in addition to the pigment field, the solar irradiance and the photosynthetic performance of the phytoplankton in a given light field. Photosynthetic performance can be measured in experiments conducted in ships at sea. It should be understood that the primary production fields are estimates only: they represent our best effort to combine data from satellites and from ships to calculate this important property of the marine ecosystem.