Spatiotemporal association patterns between marine net primary production and environmental parameters in a view of data mining

Global marine net primary production (NPP) shows different spatiotemporal distributions driven by marine environmental parameters, however, the spatiotemporal association patterns among the marine environmental parameters and NPP are still unclear.Thus, this paper explores the spatiotemporal association patterns among NPP and sea surface temperature (SST), sea level anomalies (SLA), sea surface precipitation (SSP), mixed layer depth (MLD), El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) events, using the remote sensing products covering a 19-year period from Jan 1998 to Dec 2016.The main results are as followings:1) In the western equatorial Pacific Ocean (PO), an abnormal decrease of SLA, an abnormal decrease of SSP, or an abnormal increase of MLD increases the supply of nutrients to phytoplankton in the euphotic zone, which results in an abnormal increase of NPP.2) In the middle equatorial PO, an abnormal increase of SLA, an abnormal increase of SSP or an abnormal decrease of MLD reduces the supply of nutrients to phytoplankton in the euphotic zone, which results in an abnormal decrease of NPP.3) In the eastern equatorial PO, an abnormal increase of SLA or an abnormal increase of SSP reduces the supply of nutrients, and an abnormal increase of MLD lower the micronutrient iron in the surface oceans, all of them could lead to an abnormal decrease of NPP.4) In the south PO, the abundance of phytoplankton cell is a negative correlation with the nutrition concentration, thus, an abnormal increase/decrease of SST could improve/reduce the photosynthetic efficiency of phytoplankton, an abnormal increase/decrease of SLA reduces/ improves the supply of nutrients to phytoplankton, and those abnormal changes causes an abnormal increase/decrease of NPP.5) El Niño events are more likely to result in the anomalous variations of NPP compared to the La Niña events.