Fidalgo Bay, WA Envriomental Data Aug 28-Sep 16 2020
Good news! Despite the thick wildfire smoke, we were able to retrieve our Manta+ 20 Multiprobe from Fidalgo Bay. After downloading the data and some quick QC I plotted a few data points.
As expected, we see large day/night swings in pH, temperature, and dissolved oxygen and longer scale variation that is probably associated with lunar cycles and weather. I used a regional salinity/alkalinity relationship to estimate dissolved CO2 concentrations and aragonite saturation state; a swing of 800 uatm pCO2 over 24 hours is pretty common! One thing I found very interesting is that in the last week there was an abrupt shift to the pH/DO cycle (shaded in grey). This could be a result of all the smoke in the air blocking out sunshine and depressing photosynthetic activity in the Bay which leads to reduced oxygen and pH conditions as net ecosystem production swings more heterotrophic.