How well do global ocean biogeochemistry models simulate dissolved iron distributions?
| Autor: | Alessandro Tagliabue, Charles A. Stock, Marcello Vichi, John P. Dunne, Ros Death, Christoph Völker, Elliot Sherman, Andrew Yool, Kazuhiro Misumi, Eric D. Galbraith, J. Keith Moore, Stephanie Dutkiewicz, Andy Ridgwell, Olivier Aumont |
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| Rok vydání: | 2016 |
| Předmět: |
Atmospheric Science
Global and Planetary Change 010504 meteorology & atmospheric sciences Earth science Geotraces Iron fertilization Biogeochemistry Climate change 010502 geochemistry & geophysics 01 natural sciences Carbon cycle Oceanography Iron cycle 13. Climate action Environmental Chemistry Environmental science Marine ecosystem 14. Life underwater Oceanic carbon cycle 0105 earth and related environmental sciences General Environmental Science |
| Zdroj: | Global Biogeochemical Cycles. 30:149-174 |
| ISSN: | 0886-6236 |
| Popis: | Numerical models of ocean biogeochemistry are relied upon to make projections about the impact of climate change on marine resources and test hypotheses regarding the drivers of past changes in climate and ecosystems. In large areas of the ocean, iron availability regulates the functioning of marine ecosystems and hence the ocean carbon cycle. Accordingly, our ability to quantify the drivers and impacts of fluctuations in ocean ecosystems and carbon cycling in space and time relies on first achieving an appropriate representation of the modern marine iron cycle in models. When the iron distributions from 13 global ocean biogeochemistry models are compared against the latest oceanic sections from the GEOTRACES program, we find that all models struggle to reproduce many aspects of the observed spatial patterns. Models that reflect the emerging evidence for multiple iron sources or subtleties of its internal cycling perform much better in capturing observed features than their simpler contemporaries, particularly in the ocean interior. We show that the substantial uncertainty in the input fluxes of iron results in a very wide range of residence times across models, which has implications for the response of ecosystems and global carbon cycling to perturbations. Given this large uncertainty, iron fertilization experiments based on any single current generation model should be interpreted with caution. Improvements to how such models represent iron scavenging and also biological cycling are needed to raise confidence in their projections of global biogeochemical change in the ocean. |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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