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Areas of the global major river plumes

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Abstract

River plumes are the regions where the most intense river-sea-land interaction occurs, and they are characterized by complex material transport and biogeochemical processes. However, due to their highly dynamic nature, global river plume areas have not yet been determined for use in synthetic studies of global oceanography. Based on global climatological monthly averaged salinity data from the NOAA World Ocean Atlas 2009 (WOA09), and monthly averaged salinity contour maps of the East and South China Seas from the Chinese Marine Atlas, we extract the monthly plume areas of major global rivers using a geographic information system (GIS) technique. Only areas with salinities that are three salinity units lower than the average salinity in each ocean are counted. This conservative estimate shows that the minimum and maximum monthly values of the total plume area of the world’s 19 largest rivers are 1.72×106 km2 in May and 5.38×106 km2 in August. The annual mean area of these river plumes (3.72×106 km2) takes up approximately 14.2% of the total continental shelves areaworldwide (26.15×106 km2). This paper also presents river plume areas for different oceans and latitude zones, and analyzes seasonal variations of the plume areas and their relationships with river discharge. These statistics describing the major global river plume areas can now provide the basic data for the various flux calculations in the marginal seas, and therefore will be of useful for many oceanographic studies.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Earth Sciences, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, 310027, China

    Yan Kang, Delu Pan & Xiaoyan Chen

  2. State Key Laboratory of Satellite Ocean Environment Dynamics, Second Institute of Oceanography, State Oceanic Administration, Hangzhou, 310012, China

    Yan Kang, Delu Pan, Yan Bai, Xianqiang He, Xiaoyan Chen & Difeng Wang

  3. Institute ofMarine Geology and Chemistry, National Sun Yat-sen University, Kaohsiung, Taiwan, 804, China

    Chen-Tung Arthur Chen

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  1. Yan Kang
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  2. Delu Pan
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  7. Difeng Wang
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Correspondence to Delu Pan.

Additional information

Foundation item: The National Basic Research Program of China (973 Program) under contract No. 2009CB421202; the Public Science and Technology Research Funds Projects of Ocean under contract No. 200905012; the National Natural Science Foundation of China under contract Nos 41271378, 40976110 and 40706061; the National High Technology Research and Development Program of China (863 Program) under contract No. 2007AA092201.

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Kang, Y., Pan, D., Bai, Y. et al. Areas of the global major river plumes. Acta Oceanol. Sin. 32, 79–88 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13131-013-0269-5

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