A Lagrangian study of the contribution of the Canary coastal upwelling to the open North Atlantic nitrogen budget
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract. The Canary Current System (CanCS) is a major Eastern Boundary Upwelling System (EBUS), known for its high nearshore productivity and for sustaining large fisheries. Only a part of the inorganic nutrients that upwell along Northwest Africa are being used to fuel the high nearshore productivity. The remainder together with some of the newly formed organic nutrients are exported offshore into the adjacent oligotrophic subtropical gyre of the North Atlantic. Yet, the offshore reach of these nutrients and their importance for the biogeochemistry of the open North Atlantic is not yet fully quantified. Here, we determine the lateral transport of both organic and inorganic nitrogen from the Canary upwelling and investigate the timescales, reach, and structure of offshore transport using a Lagrangian modelling approach. To this end, we track all water parcels entering the coastal ocean and upwelling along the Northwest African coast between 14° N and 35° N, as simulated by an eddy-resolving configuration of the Regional Ocean Modeling System (ROMS). Our model analysis suggests that the vast majority of the upwelled waters originate from offshore and below the euphotic zone (70 m depth), and once upwelled remain in the top 100 m. The offshore transport is intense, yet it varies greatly along the coast. The central CanCS (21° N–28° N) transports the largest amount of water offshore, thanks to a larger upwelling volume and a faster offshore transport. In contrast, the southern CanCS (14° N–21° N) exports more nitrogen from the nearshore, primarily because of the higher nitrogen-content of its upwelling waters. Beyond 200 km, this nitrogen offshore transport declines rapidly because the shallow depth of most water parcels supports high organic matter formation and subsequent export of the organic nitrogen to depth. The horizontal pattern of offshore transport is characterized by latitudinally alternating offshore-onshore corridors indicating a strong contribution of mesoscale eddies and filaments to the mean transport. Around 1/3 of the total offshore transport of water occurs around major capes along the CanCS. The persistent filaments associated with these capes are responsible for an up to four-fold enhancement of the offshore transport of water and nitrogen in the first 400 km. Much of this water and nitrogen stems from upwelling at quite some distance from the capes, confirming the capes' role in collecting water from along the coast. North of Cape Blanc and within the first 500 km from the coast, water recirculation is a dominant feature of offshore transport. This process, likely associated with mesoscale eddies, tends to reduce the efficiency of offshore transport. This process is less important in the southern CanCS along the Mauritanian coast. The Canary upwelling is modelled to supply around 44 mmol N m−2 yr−1 and 7 mmol N m−2 yr−1 to the North Atlantic Tropical Gyral (NATR) and the North Atlantic Subtropical Gyral East (NASE) Longhurst provinces, respectively. In the NATR, this represents nearly half (45 ± 15 %) of the estimated total new production, while in the NASE, this fraction is small (3.5 ± 1.5 %). Our results highlight the importance of the CanCS upwelling as a key source of nutrient to the open North Atlantic and stress the need for improving the representation of EBUS in global coarse resolution models.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".