This award supports a three year program to measure new production in the eastern equatorial Pacific and to quantitatively test models that predict new production from other indexes of surface water production. The field work will be done as part of on an already funded project by NOAA and in collaboration with other NSF investigators. New production is related to the amount of carbon lost from ocean surface waters and the eastern equatorial Pacific is thought to be a very active area for new production. This work forms part of evolving efforts in Global Ocean Flux Studies (GOFS) that are partially supported by Biological Oceanography.
