Journal of Plankton Research, Vol 21, 877-822, Copyright © 1999 by Oxford University Press
L Seuront, F Schmitt, Y Lagadeuc, D Schertzer and S Lovejoy
A multifractal method of analysis, initially developed in the framework of
turbulence and having had developments and applications in various
geophysical domains (meteorology, hydrology, climate, remote sensing,
environmental monitoring, seismicity, volcanology), has previously been
demonstrated to be an efficient tool to analyse the intermittent
fluctuations of physical or biological oceanographic data (Seuront
et al., Geophys. Res. Lett., 23, 3591-3594, 1996 and
Nonlin. Processes Geophys., 3, 236-246 1996). Thus,
the aim of this paper is, first, to present the conceptual bases of
multifractal and more precisely a stochastic multifractal framework which
among different advantages lead in a rather straightforward manner to
universal multifractals. We emphasize that contrary to basic analysis
techniques such as power spectral analysis, universal multifractals allow
the description of the whole statistics of a given field with only three
basic parameters. Second, we provide a comprehensive detailed description
of the analysis techniques applied in such a framework to marine ecologists
and oceanographers; and third, we illustrate their applicability to an
original time series of biological and related physical parameters. Our
illustrative analyses were based on a 48 h high-frequency time series of
in vivo fluorescence (i.e. estimate of phytoplankton
biomass), simultaneously recorded with temperature and salinity in the
tidally mixed coastal waters of the Eastern English Channel. Phytoplankton
biomass, which surprisingly exhibits three distinct scaling regimes (i.e. a
physical-biological-physical transition), was demonstrated to exhibit a
very specific heterogeneous distribution, in the framework of universal
multifractals, over smaller (<10 m) and larger (>500 m)
scales dominated by different turbulent processes as over intermediate
scales (10-500 m) obviously dominated by biological processes.
ORIGINAL ARTICLES
Universal multifractal analysis as a tool to characterize multiscale intermittent patterns: example of phytoplankton distribution in turbulent coastal waters
Station Marine de Wimereux, Université des Sciences et Technologies de Lille, CNRS-UPRESA 8013 ELICO, BP 80, 62930 Wimereux, France; Institut Royal Météorologieque, Section Climatologie Dynamique, 3 avenue Circulaire, 1180 Brussels, Belgium; Laboratoire de Modélisation en Mécanique, Université Pierre et Marie Curie, CNRS-UMR 7607, Case 162, 4 place Jussieu, 75252 Paris, Cedex 05, France; Physics Department, McGill University, 3600 University Street, Montréal, H3A 258, Canada; Present address: Department of Fluid Mechanics, VUB, Pleinlaan 2, 1050 Brussels, Belgium; Corresponding author
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