Correction: Kulk et al. Primary Production, an Index of Climate Change in the Ocean: Satellite-Based Estimates over Two Decades. Remote Sens. 2020, 12, 826

Abstract

Since the article “Primary Production, an Index of Climate Change in the Ocean: Satellite-Based Estimates over Two Decades” by Kulk et al. [1] was published, we discovered an error in the code of the primary production model, which crept in when the code was updated from the original version described by Platt and Sathyendranath (1988), Sathyendranath et al. (1995) and Longhurst et al. (1995) ([2,31,52] in [1]). The main error in the code led to a time interval for the integration of daily water-column primary production that was shorter than it should have been. As a consequence, daily surface irradiance and hence primary production were systematically underestimated by 20–25% for the entire time series. We also discovered that the Photosynthetic Active Radiation (PAR) products of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) that were used to scale the daily light cycle were rounded down for 2003–2019 (MODIS years), which led to an additional but small underestimation of daily surface irradiance. In addition to addressing these errors, we have included a merged time series of the PAR product to remove inter-sensor biases (as described in the corrected text of Appendix B; see below). The main corrections increased our estimate of global annual primary production on average by +23.9% between 1998 and 2018, while the correction of the rounding error in the PAR products increased global annual primary production between 2003 and 2018 by +0.9%. Inclusion of the merged PAR product in the primary production model caused a −0.25% decrease in global annual primary production between 1998 and 2002 and a +0.08% increase between 2003 and 2010 (relative to the aforementioned +23.9% increase for the entire time series). Our estimate of global annual primary production between 1998 and 2018 now is 48.7 to 52.5 Gt C y−1 instead of the published estimate of 38.8 to 42.1 Gt C y−1. Although this is a substantial increase in the estimate of primary production, the results of the sensitivity analysis in which the photosynthesis versus irradiance parameters were varied by ±1 standard deviation and, importantly, the observed trends in regional and global annual primary production are largely unchanged. We therefore consider the outcomes of the study still valid after the corrections. We also note that our corrected estimate of global annual primary production is still within the range of earlier reports (32.0–70.7 Gt C y−1 [5,104] in [1]). The corrected paragraphs, tables and figures appear below. All references mentioned below can be found in the original article [1]. The corrections affect a number of results, but the nature of the corrections is largely the same: the magnitude of primary production has increased significantly everywhere, whereas the trends have been affected only marginally, and the major conclusions remain unchanged, except for the magnitude of marine primary production. The authors apologise for any inconvenience caused. The original article has been updated