Relationships between optical backscattering, particulate organic carbon, and phytoplankton carbon in the oligotrophic South China Sea basin.

The particulate backscattering coefficient (b) provides effective proxies for particulate organic carbon (POC) and phytoplankton carbon (C); however, their bio-optical relationships in the oligotrophic ocean are rarely reported. In this work, based on the in-situ synchronous optical and biogeochemical measurements in the oligotrophic South China Sea (SCS) basin, we refined the regional relationships between POC (and C) and b and investigated the impacts of phytoplankton community compositions and size classes on the b variability. The observations showed that: 1) POC and C exhibited good linear relationships with b; 2) the relationship between C and POC could also be fitted in a linear function with a positive POC intercept, and the POC contributed by phytoplankton-covarying non-algal particles was nearly two-fold of C; and 3) the POC-specific b (b*) was positively correlated with the fraction of the phytoplankton groups haptophytes (Type 8) and diatoms to total Chla, but negatively correlated with the fraction of pico-phytoplankton to Chla (f). These findings suggest that in oligotrophic waters, the variability of b* was mainly determined by the variability in the relative contribution of large phytoplankton with complex structures.