Data for creating figures to the paper "Assessing Net Growth of Phytoplankton Biomass on Hourly to Annual Timescales Using the Geostationary Ocean Color Instrument."

Processed data to generate figures for the paper "Assessing Net Growth of Phytoplankton Biomass on Hourly to Annual Timescales Using the Geostationary Ocean Color Instrument."

The rate at which microscopic ocean plants, or phytoplankton, consume carbon dioxide represents a gap in scientific knowledge that needs to be filled in order to better model the earth system. To aid in this understanding we use a novel technique that allows us to track the growth behavior of phytoplankton in the Yellow Sea and the East Sea-Japan Sea.  This is enabled by using satellite data from the Geostationary Ocean Color Imager, which has the unprecedented ability to collect quality biological information from the ocean surface each daylight hour.  We find that the results, while in agreement with local observations and other satellite studies, also contain information about how phytoplankton change over daily to annual cycles and how native communities adapt in response to the annual solar cycle.  This information is useful to the ocean modeling community, that seeks to understand various ways in which phytoplankton communities affect the cycling of Earth’s carbon.