LIDAR CALIBRATED SATELLITE SENSED PRIMARY PRODUCTION IN THE

The carbon cycle is among the more important global phenomena affecting the Earth’s cli-mate. The Southern Ocean is probably one of the less studied oceanic provinces and a thor-ough understanding of its role in that natural process requires further study. In this paper, new estimates of the primary production (PP) of Antarctic waters from 1997 to 2003 are provided. They are based on a PP model tuned in Antarctica and on satellite derived chloro-phyll-a (Chl-a) concentrations calculated with an original bio-optical algorithm calibrated with lidar measurements carried out in the Southern Ocean. The results presented here indi-cate that usual PP models applied to standard Chl-a concentrations can underestimate PP up to 50%