Seasonal variability of coastal upwelling and the upwelling front off central Chile

Influence of large scale oscillations on upwelling-favorable coastal wind off central Chile

[1] Along the central coast of Chile is typically equatorward, upwelling-favorable wind associated with the southeast Pacific anticyclone. A coastal low-level jet often develops, and its wind speed is mostly controlled by the meridional pressure gradient. While the low-level jet is a mesoscale feature forced by an interaction between synoptic conditions and coastal topography, regional sea leve...

Inter-annual variability of the Pelagic-Benthic coupling in the upwelling system off central Chile

The coastal region of central Chile (36 S) is one of the most productive coastal systems, characterized by a marked seasonality in the upwelling regime, that brings subsurface waters rich in nutrient and poor in oxygen (ESSW) into the euphotic zone. This oceanographic condition depends basically on the equatorward wind strength and is modified on different time scales, with the El Niño-Southern...

Metagenomes of the Picoalga Bathycoccus from the Chile Coastal Upwelling

Among small photosynthetic eukaryotes that play a key role in oceanic food webs, picoplanktonic Mamiellophyceae such as Bathycoccus, Micromonas, and Ostreococcus are particularly important in coastal regions. By using a combination of cell sorting by flow cytometry, whole genome amplification (WGA), and 454 pyrosequencing, we obtained metagenomic data for two natural picophytoplankton populatio...

Upwelling response to atmospheric coastal jets off Central Chile: A modeling study of the October 2000 event

Twelve Years of Change in Coastal Upwelling along the Central-Northern Coast of Chile: Spatially Heterogeneous Responses to Climatic Variability

We use time-series analyses to characterize the effects of recent climate variability upon the local physical conditions at 11 study sites along the northern-central coast of Chile (29-34°S). Environmental indices show that the 1° Bakun upwelling index in this coastal region has fluctuated in time, starting from a stable period around the 1980's, peaking during the mid 90s, decreasing during th...