MULTIFRACTAL ANALYSIS OF PHYTOPLANKTON BIOMASS AND TEMPERATURE IN THEOCEAN

Many attempts have been made to relate distributions to their turbulen t These studies have not taken the intermittent nature of turbulent pr ocesses into account, and hence poorly approximate inhomogeneous patte rns, Since these oceanic fields are scaling for a wide range of scales , and scaling processes are believed to generically yield universal mu ltifractal (characterized by three basic exponents), it is natural to analyse temperature and phytoplankton biomass in such a framework. Ove r the range 0.5s to 11h30', the temperature followed a single scaling regime, whereas the phytoplankton had both a low and high frequency re gime (the break occurring at about 100s). We estimated the universal m ultifractal parameters finding that fluorescence was nearly dynamicall y passive (i.e. similar to temperature) on smaller scales but biologic ally active at larger scales.