Article No. jm980394 Common signals between physical and atmospheric variables and zooplankton biomass in the Subarctic Pacific

• Main Authors: Ra Conversi, Sultan Hameed
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Subjects: Key words; climate–ocean interactions; copepod; Gulf of Alaska; inter-annual varia- tions; North Pacific; Quasi Biennial Oscillation; salinity; SST; time series; zooplankton biomass; Pacific; Subarctic; Alaska
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.586.68; http://icesjms.oxfordjournals.org/content/55/4/739.full.pdf

Conversi, A., and Hameed, S. 1998. Common signals between physical and atmos-pheric variables and zooplankton biomass in the Subarctic Pacific. – ICES Journal of Marine Sciences, 55: 739–747. There is increasing evidence that zooplankton inter-annual variability is related to changes in the physical and atmospheric environments. Here, we analyse and compare the inter-annual variations of zooplankton biomass and of two environmental properties – surface temperature and surface salinity – at Station P, Gulf of Alaska (50)N 145)W). This 1956–1980 data set was gathered by Canadian weatherships, with a frequency of approximately 1 month. Spectral analysis shows that the annual cycle dominates the variations of zooplankton biomass, as well as temperature and salinity. However, most of the inter-annual variability in all three properties is contained in frequency bands corresponding to periods near 12–24 years, 26 years, 229 months, and 214.5 months. These frequencies correspond to those found in well-known oscillations in the atmosphere–ocean system. In this article we summarize some of the results of our work, compare our results with others reported in the literature and discuss possible