Retrieval of Phytoplankton Pigments from Underway Spectrophotometry in the Fram Strait

• Main Authors: Liu, Yangyang, Boss, Emmanuel, Chase, Alison, Xi, Hongyan, Zhang, Xiaodong, Röttgers, Rüdiger, Pan, Yanqun, Bracher, Astrid
• Format: Text
• Language: unknown
• Published: The Aquila Digital Community 2019
• Subjects: phytoplankton pigments; phytoplankton absorption; underway AC-S flow-through system; Gaussian demomposition; matrix inversion; singular value decomposition; non-negative least squares; Life Sciences; Marine Biology; Fram Strait
• Online Access: https://aquila.usm.edu/fac_pubs/16262; https://aquila.usm.edu/context/fac_pubs/article/17573/viewcontent/retrieval_of_phytoplankton.pdf

Phytoplankton in the ocean are extremely diverse. The abundance of various intracellular pigments are often used to study phytoplankton physiology and ecology, and identify and quantify different phytoplankton groups. In this study, phytoplankton absorption spectra (αph(λ)) derived from underway flow-through AC-S measurements in the Fram Strait are combined with phytoplankton pigment measurements analyzed by high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) to evaluate the retrieval of various pigment concentrations at high spatial resolution. The performances of two approaches, Gaussian decomposition and the matrix inversion technique are investigated and compared. Our study is the first to apply the matrix inversion technique to underway spectrophotometry data. We find that Gaussian decomposition provides good estimates (median absolute percentage error, MPE 21–34%) of total chlorophyll-a (TChl-a), total chlorophyll-b (TChl-b), the combination of chlorophyll-c1 and -c2 (Chl-c1/2), photoprotective (PPC) and photosynthetic carotenoids (PSC). This method outperformed one of the matrix inversion algorithms, i.e., singular value decomposition combined with non-negative least squares (SVD-NNLS), in retrieving TChl-b, Chl-c1/2, PSC, and PPC. However, SVD-NNLS enables robust retrievals of specific carotenoids (MPE 37–65%), i.e., fucoxanthin, diadinoxanthin and 19'-hexanoyloxyfucoxanthin, which is currently not accomplished by Gaussian decomposition. More robust predictions are obtained using the Gaussian decomposition method when the observed (αph(λ)) is normalized by the package effect index at 675 nm. The latter is determined as a function of “packaged” αph (675) and TChl-a concentration, which shows potential for improving pigment retrieval accuracy by the combined use of (αph(λ)) and TChl-a concentration data. To generate robust estimation statistics for the matrix inversion technique, we combine leave-one-out cross-validation with data perturbations. We find that both approaches provide useful information on pigment ...