Coastal uplift in the Kuroshio

The Kuroshio is the western boundary current of the North Pacific Ocean. In the subtropical region of eastern Taiwan, a coastal uplift of the isotherms has occurred. To explore its impact on this oligotrophic ecosystem, hydrographic data along the transect line at 23.75oN were measured between September 2012 and September 2014. Results show that the intensity of coastal uplift was positively correlated to the flow volume transport of the Kuroshio. Significant dissolved inorganic nutrients were uplifted to the sunlit zone, especially onshore. This dataset contains data collected from six shipboard measurements taken from the R/V Ocean Researcher I between September of 2012 and 2014: September and November 2012, June and September 2013, and July and September 2014 in the Kuroshio, east of Taiwan described in the paper: “Chung-Chi Chen, Chun-Yi Lu, Sen Jan, Chih-Hao Hsieh, Chih-Ching Chung (2022). Effects of the coastal uplift on the Kuroshio ecosystem, eastern Taiwan, the western boundary current of the North Pacific Ocean. Frontiers in Marine Science“.

The main results of this study included eight figures as described in the paper, and please refer to it for further details.

Methods
To understand the coastal uplift effect on the Kuroshio ecosystem, eight stations (K101–K108) along a transect (KTV1) between 121.72° and 123° E at 23.75° N were repeatedly surveyed across the Kuroshio, east of Taiwan. At each station, seawater was sampled at eight depths (2–5, 10, 30, 50, 100, 150, 200, and 250 m), using Teflon-coated Go-Flo bottles (20 l, General Oceanics Inc., USA) mounted on a General Oceanic rosette assembly. Sub-samples were taken for analyses of dissolved inorganic nutrients (e.g., nitrate, phosphate, and silicate), chlorophyll a (Chl a), autotrophic picoplankton (e.g., Synechococcus, Prochlorococcus, and picoeukaryotes) and heterotrophic bacteria abundances. The analyzed methods for each variable can be found from the paper. The data has been processed by a linear regression analysis using “SigmaStat” to produce an ms accepted for publication in Frontiers in Marine Science.