Effect of oceanic mesoscale eddy merger on primary production

Oceanic mesoscle eddies affect ocean biological production and the following four mechanisms were indicated in the previous studies: vertical eddy pumping, eddy-wind interaction, horizontal eddy advection and submesoscale features. We focused on merger of eddies and investigated the effect of merger on the distribution of primary production at the eddy region. Neighbor enclosed area tracking algorithm, which was able to detect merger of eddies as a special overlap of the eddy regions, was applied to track each eddy region identified using Okubo-Weiss parameter derived from AVISO satellite altimetry data. We found that there was a difference between primary production distributions before and after the eddy merger through composite analysis of eddy tracking output and 10-year time series of ocean net primary production.