Anthropogenic climate change drives non-stationary phytoplankton variance

• Main Authors: Elsworth, Geneviève W., Lovenduski, Nicole S., Krumhardt, Kristen M., Marchitto, Thomas M., Schlunegger, Sarah
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: Copernicus Publications 2022
• Subjects: article; Verlagsveröffentlichung; Pacific; Southern Ocean; North Atlantic
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-2022-579; https://noa.gwlb.de/receive/cop_mods_00062007; https://egusphere.copernicus.org/preprints/egusphere-2022-579/egusphere-2022-579.pdf

Multiple studies conducted with Earth System Models suggest that anthropogenic climate change will influence marine phytoplankton over the coming century. Light limited regions are projected to become more productive and nutrient limited regions less productive. Anthropogenic climate change can influence not only the mean state, but also the variance around the mean state, yet little is known about how variance in marine phytoplankton will change with time. Here, we quantify the influence of anthropogenic climate change on internal variability in marine phytoplankton biomass from 1920 to 2100 using the Community Earth System Model 1 Large Ensemble (CESM1-LE). We find a significant decrease in the internal variance of global phytoplankton carbon biomass under a high emission (RCP8.5) scenario, with heterogeneous regional trends. Decreasing variance in biomass is most apparent in the subpolar North Atlantic and North Pacific. In these high-latitude regions, zooplankton grazing acts as a top-down control in reducing internal variance in phytoplankton biomass, with bottom-up controls (e.g., light, nutrients) having only a small effect on biomass variance. Grazing-driven declines in phytoplankton variance are also apparent in the biogeochemically critical regions of the Southern Ocean and the Equatorial Pacific. Our results suggest that climate mitigation and adaptation efforts that account for marine phytoplankton changes (e.g., fisheries) should also consider changes in phytoplankton and zooplankton variance driven by anthropogenic warming, particularly on regional scales.