Appendix – Remote Sensing

Introduction The Sea-viewing Wide Field-of-view Sensor (SeaWiFS) was launched in September 1997 to provide quantitative data on global ocean bio-optical properties to the Earth science community. Using ratios of the water leaving radiance SeaWiFS imagery can be used to quantify properties such as the chlorophyll concentration (O’Reilly et al., 1998). Algorithms have been developed to use the surface chlorophyll concentration detected by the satellite to allow an estimate of the phytoplankton primary production to be made (Joint and Groom, 2000). It is a logical progression to therefore search for methodologies which use satellite data to provide estimates of secondary production. The copepod egg production model of Prestidge et al. (1995) provides such a medium. For the purposes of the Shelf Edge Advection Mortality And Recruitment (SEAMAR) project, this model, which was originally developed for use in the Irish Sea, was extended to cover the entire SEAMAR model domain (see figure 1). The model uses as input sea surface temperature (SST) and chlorophyll data to produce a species specific egg production (EP) rate; this is assumed to depend exponentially on temperature and to have a Michaelis-Menten relationship with the food concentration.