Phytoplankton abundance in the Barents Sea is predictable up to five years in advance

Abstract

The Barents Sea is a highly biologically productive Arctic shelf sea with several commercially important fish stocks. Interannual-to-decadal predictions of its ecosystem would therefore be valuable for marine resource management. Here, we demonstrate that the abundance of phytoplankton, the base of the marine food web, can be predicted up to five years in advance in the Barents Sea with the Norwegian Climate Prediction Model. We identify two different mechanisms giving rise to this predictability; 1) in the southern ice-free Atlantic Domain, skillful prediction is a result of the advection of waters with anomalous nitrate concentrations from the Subpolar North Atlantic; 2) in the northern Polar Domain, phytoplankton predictability is a result of the skillful prediction of the summer ice concentration, which influences the light availability. The skillful prediction of the phytoplankton abundance is an important step forward in the development of numerical ecosystem predictions of the Barents Sea.