On 9th September 2022, the PRIMUS team - comprising scientists across six international institutes from UK, Portugal, Spain and South Africa (PML, MARE/FC.ID, CSIC, IPMA, ULPGC, CSIR) - gathered online for the Mid-Term Review meeting with ESA-representatives, Jerôme Benveniste and Marco Restano. Among the main points of the meeting was to discuss the progress of ongoing project deliverables linked to WP3 Development and Validation (lead Bror Jonsson, PML), and WP4 Experimental Dataset Generation (lead Tom Jackson, PML), and the kick-off of WP5 Advancing Earth System Science (lead Bror Jonsson, PML).
The PRIMUS team during the Mid-Term Review meeting with ESA in early November 2022.
Three among the nine science cases which will be developed over the second year of PRIMUS were presented: Bror Jonsson presented Science Case 3 during which he will make good use of Net Primary Production (NPP) data (both in-situ and high-resolution NPP estimates) gathered during PRIMUS, towards developing a Lagrangian estimation of primary production in the Atlantic upwelling systems. Vanda Brotas (FC.ID) presented Science Case 7 dealing with the link between primary productivity and fisheries in the Iberian Upwelling system. The study builds on the work by Ferreira et al. (2021) who reported a recent decrease in sardine recruitment around Portugal, likely modulated by abiotic changes including the rise of SST during winter. Finally, Catarina Guerreiro (FC.ID) presented Science Case 8, during which sediment trap data collected from two sites in the Canary Current EBUS will be compared to PRIMUS-produced NPP dataset, using both standard and Lagrangian approaches. We want to investigate the main sources and most persistent trajectories of water masses influencing ocean productivity in this region, and evaluate whether these trajectories changed between the surface and the depth of the traps at 1200 m. Our plan is to contribute to distinguish the effects of coastal upwelling from other NPP-drivers to gain insight into the functioning of the Canary Current EBUS.
Bror Jonsson presenting the spatial distribution of timescales of variability in Sea Surface Temperature (SST) and Chlorophyll-a concentrations (Chl-a) across all the Atlantic EBUS.
Over the next months, our team will be actively developing WP5 and WP6 aimed at maximising the scientific and societally relevant outputs of PRIMUS Experimental 4DAtlantic datasets towards understanding the temporal and spatial variability of NPP in all Atlantic EBUS.
Stay tuned for more updates in the upcoming months!