Biogeographical Classification of the Global Ocean From BGC‐Argo Floats

Biogeographical classifications of the global ocean generalize spatiotemporal trends in species or biomass distributions across discrete ocean biomes or provinces. These classifications are generally based on a combination of remote-sensed proxies of phytoplankton biomass and global climatologies of biogeochemical or physical parameters. However, these approaches are limited in their capacity to account for subsurface variability in these parameters. The deployment of autonomous profiling floats in the Biogeochemical Argo network over the last decade has greatly increased global coverage of subsurface measurements of bio-optical proxies for phytoplankton biomass and physiology. In this study, we used empirical orthogonal function analysis to identify the main components of variability in a global data set of 422 annual time series of Chlorophyll