Presenters-0476
From CSDMS
CSDMS 2020: Linking Ecosphere and Geosphere
Challenges and Opportunities for Ocean Biogeochemical Prediction
Abstract
The ocean is an important component in Earth’s climate system and rapidly changing. Warming, loss of oxygen and sea-ice, acidification, and intensifying vertical density stratification critically affect ocean biogeochemistry including the photosynthetic production of organic matter. The latter supports the entire marine food web and plays a major role in regulating Earth’s climate by sequestering CO2 in the ocean’s interior. Despite the urgent scientific and societal need for quantifying the ocean’s present biogeochemical state and predicting how it is changing, state-of-the-art biogeochemical models are insufficiently validated and poorly constrained by observations. This is primarily due to the insufficient availability of biogeochemical ocean observations and especially problematic because biogeochemical models aren’t based on first principles, are highly non-linear and have many poorly know parameters. In this presentation I will illustrate some of these problems and then discuss opportunities that arise from a new global ocean observation initiative referred to as Biogeochemical (BGC) Argo. BGC Argo builds on the highly successful Argo program which has maintained a global array of almost 4,000 profiling floats that measure physical ocean properties and relay their data in real time. Capitalizing on this success and recent advances in sensor technology, the addition of biogeochemical sensors to Argo floats is now ongoing. By providing a broad suite of observations with unprecedented spatial and temporal coverage, and integrating it into biogeochemical models and data products, the BGC Argo program is likely to transform ocean biogeochemical analysis and prediction. I will present some early examples.
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