Water samples were taken during North Sea to Fram Strait expedition PS121 with RV Polarstern from 11 Aug to 10 Sep 2019. Water samples were collected from CTD Niskin bottles at five to six different depths from the upper 100 m and additionally from the ship's seawater supply pumped through teflon tubing from about 11m depth during underway as described in Liu et al (2018). All collected samples were filtered through 25 cm Whatman GF/F filters, respectively, under low-vacuum pressure (below 200 mbar). Blank filters were collected by soaking them in 0.2um filtered seawater. Measurements for particulate and non-algal (NAP) absorption were performed directly after filtration the quantitative filtration techniques-intergrative cavity measurement device and procedure from Röttgers et al. (2016) as described in Liu et al. (2018). Phytoplankton absorption (aph) was derived by subtracting the NAP (Bracher et al. 2021) from the particulate absorption.

Further specifications on the measurements:a) Instrument: light source: UV-VIS lamp (CF-1000- HC lamp, Illumination Technology, USA); absorption meter: Quantitative Filter Technique - Integrating Cavity Absorption Meter (QFT-ICAM) (Röttgers et al., 2016) with 80 mm- diameter integrating sphere; detector: photodiode array spectrometer (AVASPEC-ULS2048-RS-USB2, Avantes, the Netherlands).b) wavelength range of scan and resolution: 313.5-875.7 nm, 0.3 nm.c) slit band width: 2 nm.d) sample filters were bleached with 10% sodium hypochlorite (NaClO) solution for the OD measurement of NAP.e) samples were measured for four times and bleached samples were measured twice.f) dark current and blank filters were measured and subtracted.Further specifications about data analysis:a) interpolated wavelength range and resolution: 320-844 nm, 2nm.b) wavelength range for fluorescence correction: 670:800 nm.c) diameter of sample patch on GF/F filter: 2.133 cm.d) pathlength amplification factor (beta correction factor): 4.06 (Röttgers et al., 2016).e) no scattering correction for total particle absorption is applied; NAP absorption was adjusted with an offset in the range of 710-750 nm so that the median value of NAP absorption equals the median value of in total particle absorption in this spectral range. This adjustment is based on the assumption that phytoplankton pigments do not absorb in near-infrared (Neeley et al., 2018). This adjustment was not applied to NAP OD data.