Week 4: Living Oceans - Topic 4b - Carbon and phytoplankton

Carbon is a fundamental building block of life. As such carbon is a common component in most ecosystem and climate models.

To know if these models are correct, and to understand what drives the carbon cycle, we need data to help us understand ocean carbon content. Satellite ocean colour data offer suitable spatial and temporal scales to capture this by measuring reflected light. The challenge is to understand what links carbon with variability in the ocean colour signal. This can be tricky.