Modelling Ocean’s Breath: Improving Mesoscale Representation for Biogeochemical Cycles – MOBIM

The ocean is an essential component in the Earth’s oxygen and carbon cycles. Ocean oxygen content is central to marine ecosystems, affecting health of fisheries when its lacking, and has consequent impacts on global economics and food security. Normally regarded as a carbon sink, the ocean is important as a buffer for future climate change. Understanding and predicting how the aquatic lungs of the Earth evolve in terms of the oceanic oxygen and carbon cycles is therefore crucial for humanity’s adaptation in the future. A crucial tool scientists have at their disposal are numerical models, which simulate the complex multi-scale interactions of physical and biogeochemical processes. The fidelity of the modelled biogeochemical processes are important for representing the relevant oxygen and carbon cycles, but on global scales, the ocean turbulence and simulated currents contributing to nutrient, oxygen and carbon transport can be equally important, if not more so. While many works have considered improving the representation of oxygen and carbon cycles by improving the modelled biogeochemistry models, here we focus on the physics related to ocean mesoscale eddies. With the above analogy, ocean mesoscale eddies could be likened to the alveoli of the lungs: crucial for respiration, fundamentally small-scale and not well-represented, but the collective impact of the small processes critically affect the overall large-scale function of the lungs. The proposed project considers an increasingly validated representation of ocean mesoscale eddies, and quantifies its efficacy in global models that are typically used for informing the scientific case of United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports. The proposed work contributes knowledge towards the upcoming IPCC reports, and furthers our fundamental understanding of the Earth’s aquatic lungs.