NASA’s Earth Observatory has just published a set of images showing average global primary production fro the period 1999 to 2008. The images show the most highly productive areas of land and ocean by colour (demonstrating again how productive the seas are off the UK). You can see how transient events – like an unusually wet year, can dramatically increase the vegetation levels over desert areas. As the covering notes say, however, it is not so clear why oceanic productivity varies so greatly from one year to the next. For more details and all of the images from this super gallery:

Global biosphere

Barry