Phytoplankton Front Edges
ProThin lines where the detector found a phytoplankton change sharp enough to call a front. A pixel is either on a line or not, so on a flat day the map is meant to come up empty.
Updates daily
More detail
What you see. A scatter of thin lines over mostly empty water. Each line marks the middle of a zone where the amount of plant plankton changes sharply over a short distance. The layer cannot say how strong a change is.
How to use it. Switch to Phytoplankton Carbon to see the values on each side of a line, and fish it if it fits the rest of the picture. A line that holds its place across several frames counts for more. In Layer Settings you can change the line color and the Opacity.
How it relates to the other front layers. Phytoplankton Front Intensity comes from the same calculation. It shades every spot by how sharp the change is and always paints something. Use Phytoplankton Front Edges to see only where the lines are, and Phytoplankton Front Intensity to see how strong and how wide a change is. There is a pair like this for four things: SST Front Intensity and SST Front Edges for temperature, Salinity Front Intensity and Salinity Front Edges for salinity, Chlorophyll Front Intensity and Chlorophyll Front Edges for chlorophyll, and Phytoplankton Front Intensity and Phytoplankton Front Edges for plant plankton. All eight are worked out from a forecast or a model, so none of them has cloud gaps. The only front layers made from satellite pictures are SST (ACSPO) Fronts and SST (GOES-19) Fronts, and both are for temperature.
Who makes it. RipIQ makes this layer itself from the Copernicus Marine model's plant plankton, the Phytoplankton Carbon layer. The layer covers the Gulf of America, the East Coast and Baja.
Its limits. It is blank within about 2.5 nautical miles of land. There is one frame a day, about a day behind today's date. Values are revised for up to two weeks afterward. The input has a thin history, roughly May to November, so expect gaps outside that window.
When it looks blank. When this map is empty, check Phytoplankton Front Intensity for the same frame to see whether the change has weakened.
The numbers
| How often it updates | Once a day, one frame |
| How fresh it usually is | About one day behind today's date, and revised for up to two weeks afterward |
| How detailed it is | About 15 nautical miles (the Copernicus Marine model's grid) |
| Where it covers | Gulf of America, East Coast and Baja, minus a band of about 2.5 nautical miles along every coast |
| How far back you can look | 8 days back |
| Goes blank under cloud? | Never |
| Observed or modeled | Calculated by RipIQ from the Copernicus model |
| What you see on screen | Lines only |
Source: computed by RipIQ from Phytoplankton Carbon (Copernicus model).