Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2026

DOI

10.1038/s41598-026-45238-1

Publication Title

Scientific Reports

Volume

16

Pages

14497

Abstract

Field observations in the northern South China Sea (NSCS) indicate that elevated concentrations of chlorophyll a (Chl_a) associated with non-linear internal waves (NIWs) were more pronounced in the subsurface than at the sea-surface. At a given surface Chl_a, the vertically integrated Chl_a in an NIW-active area was 45% higher than that in an area where the NIW activities were minimal. As a result, net primary production (PPeu) estimated from surface Chl_a from remote sensing by using the current Chl_a-based PPeu model (e.g. VGPM) would have underestimated the true value by the same amount. If this correction is applied, the activities of NIWs would have elevated PPeu in the NSCS by 89%, rather than by 15–37% as previously reported. The elevated PPeu in the areas with high NIW activities would be at least 3.57 Tg-C yr-¹. It may account for 2.0% of new production in the South China Sea.

Rights

© The Authors 2026.

This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) License, which permits any non-commercial use, sharing, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if you modified the licensed material. You do not have permission under this license to share adapted material derived from this article or parts of it. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. 

Data Availability

Article states: "The datasets generated during the current study are available in the Figshare repository, doi: 10.6084/m9.figshare.31819483."

Original Publication Citation

Pan, X., Ho, T. Y., Wong, G. T. F., Tai, J. H., Guan, S., & Shiah, F. K. (2026). Contribution of non-linear internal waves to marine net primary production has been underestimated. Scientific Reports, 16, Article 14497. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-026-45238-1

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