Impact of river-discharged freshwater on surface ocean environments revealed by synergistic use of satellite measurements in the East China Sea

Abstract

River discharge forms a plume of low-salinity water that spreads offshore, delivering terrestrial substances into the ocean and thus plays a critical role in controlling marine environments as well as the carbon cycle. This study investigated how freshwater discharged from the Changjiang impacts the physical and biological responses and oceanic uptake of carbon dioxide (CO₂) in the northern East China Sea (ECS) by combining the recently available sea surface salinity (SSS) product from the Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) mission with other satellite measurements of sea surface temperature (SST) and chlorophyll-a (chl-a) concentration. The partial pressure of CO₂ (pCO₂) and its interannual variability were estimated using empirical regression with satellite-derived environmental variables. The bias-corrected SMAP SSS revealed that river discharge largely contributed to the distinct interannual SSS variations, with a seasonal cycle reaching a maximum in winter and a minimum in summer. Compared to the SST and chl-a anomalies, we observed an increase in SST and primary production in the region where sea surface freshening was robust. Freshwater from rivers contributes to sea surface warming by trapping heat from the atmosphere at the surface layer. Nutrient-enriched freshwater within the buoyant plume enhances phytoplankton production, which in turn enriches the ocean surface with chl-a. Simultaneously, the pCO₂ was relatively low in the region where the SST and primary production were high, highlighting that the heat and riverine nutrients trapped within the buoyant plume contributed to the reduction in pCO₂ by promoting the biological uptake of CO₂. The estimates conducted here illustrate the synergistic utility of multiple satellite measurements for the evaluation of CO₂ uptake capacity, complemented by in situ measurements of river-dominated marginal seas.