Horizontal internal‐tide fluxes support elevated phytoplankton productivity over the inner continental shelf

Lay Abstract The small, free‐living, photosynthetic organisms collectively called phytoplankton are the base of the oceanic food web. The phytoplankton use the energy from sunlight to convert carbon dioxide into organic carbon. Besides the necessity for sufficient light, phytoplankton also require nutrients to photosynthesize and grow. They acquire these nutrients from the dissolved pool of nutrients in the surrounding ocean. In the surface waters, where there is sufficient light for phytoplankton growth, nutrients are often in short supply and act to limit the growth of the phytoplankton. The renewal of the nutrients in the surface ocean is controlled by the physical dynamics of the upper ocean, including waves and tides, and the influence of the wind. Since the phytoplankton are limited by the availability of nutrients, the rate at which physical dynamics supply nutrients is a fundamental control on the rate of phytoplankton productivity and thus on the entire oceanic food web. In the Southern California Bight (SCB), the nutrient fluxes that regulate the productivity of the phytoplankton are caused by internal waves. Internal waves are waves that propagate through the body of the ocean much in the same way that waves propagate on the surface of the ocean. In the SCB, the most energetic internal waves are internal waves of tidal frequency, called the internal tide . The internal tide causes transport and mixing of nutrient‐rich waters from deep and offshore to shallow coastal waters. This means that coastal waters are much more productive than the surface waters offshore (these productive coastal phytoplankton populations can even be observed from space). In this article, we demonstrate quantitatively that the horizontal flux of nutrients due to the internal tide controls the productivity of the coastal ocean in Southern California.