Remote Sensing Monitoring of Sea Surface Temperature and Chlorophyll-a Variability in the Persian Gulf and Oman Sea: Influential Factors on Net Primary Production

Primary production is a key indicator in the evalution of aquatic ecosystems that can directly affect carbon sequestration. Due to climate change and environmental dynamics, this component has changed spatially and temporally in different ecosystems. Therefore, to understand and monitor these changes, the most important influential parameters include; sea surface temperature, chlorophyll-a and algal bloom on this component and their changes were analyzed based on the time series. Images related to Chl-a, SST and NPP from January 2003 to December 2018 were used by MODIS sensor and VGPM model to estimate NPP in the study area. Aftar pre-processing and extracting the time series algorithm, the trend of variation was determined using the mann-kendall and theil-sen procedure. Then, using enhancing false color composite, algal blooms in the Persian Gulf and the sea of Oman were identified and the amount of chl-a concentration in the algal bloom area and outside the area was determined.  The results of trend analysis with theil-sen procedure showed that the rate of change for chl-a is decreasing in all regions except the fifth region. The highest amount was observed in the fifth region (-0.19), which corresponded to the rate of NPP. The results also show that the highest amount of NPP in the first region in March and the lowest in June and July (540 and 690 gC/m2/day), which corresponds to the amount of chl-a concentration. Despite the apparent correlation, there is no cause-and-effect relationship between SST and chl-a as well as chl-a and NPP. In this way, factors other than chl-a can be considered for algal bloom and NPP.