Estimation of new production from remotely-sensed data in a coastal upwelling regime

We present a comparison of new production estimates derived from traditional shipboard experiments ( 15N-tracer methodology) with the results of a model incorporating remotely-sensed data from the coastal upwelling region of Monterey Bay, CA (USA) in May, 1993. The model utilized sea-surface temperature derived from the Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR) to drive a physiologically-based estimate of nitrate uptake in upwelling phytoplankton communities. A direct comparison indicates that the modeled results accurately predict the physiological status of the phytoplankton community. However, these data also demonstrate the difficulty of direct comparison of shipboard estimates of productivity with a synoptically derived estimate for the same study site.