During my thesis defense, Alex noticed that it seems like inlets with large “Exchange Flow & Vertical Transport” terms also had large “Photosynthesis & Consumption” terms.

This week, I finally cofirmed this to be true. Figure 1 shows the mean mid-Jul to mid-Aug “Photosynthesis & Consumption” vs. “Exchange Flow & Vertical Transport” terms. Note that only deep inlets (mean depth > 10 m) are shown, and these values correspond to the deep layer of the budgets.


Fig 1. Mid-Jul through mid-Aug biology vs. physics in 13 deep terminal inlets.


I expected to observe a correlation, but I am shocked by how strong it is. Futhermore, the slope of the line is nearly equal to -1. These results suggest that the biological drawdown in the deep layer of terminal inlets is mostly explained by physical processes. Likely, physical processes introduce nutrients and detritus to the innlet.

I am worried about my manuscript’s word count and figure count, so I do not plan to include Figure 1 in the manuscript. However, I do plan to add a few sentences dicussing this new finding.