Coastal-Oceans in Global Climate Models: Assessment and Analysis (CONGA)

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Coastal and shelf seas and ocean margins are regions of immense societal importance, e.g. for fisheries and drawing down atmospheric CO2. Also they expose people to hazards such as flooding and coastal erosion, and are where people most directly impact the marine environment, e.g. through fishing and pollution. Hence, it is crucially important to understand how climate change effects these regions. This understanding generally comes from the global climate models used to project future climate change on a large scale. These models are often too coarse to be expect to perfume well in coastal and shelf seas, and often lack the specific processes active in these seas, notably tides and river outflows. These models are continually improving and given the newly released suite of global climate model projections supporting the forthcoming sixth assessment report of the Intergovermental Pannel on Climate Change, it is now very timely to ask: how well do global climate models perform in the coastal-ocean and how does this performance compare with dynamical downscaling? Dynamical downscaling is the commonly employed alternative to direct use of climate models, using finer scale global or regional ocean models driven by the climate model. Because of the diversity of ocean models and the geographic diversity of coastal and shelf seas, it is appropriate to address this question through an international network, using a common set of methods. Building an international partnership to establish this, and then develop the network is the focus of this proposal. We start with a focus on coastal and shelf sea physics and its relationship to biogeochemistry, which are important for fisheries and aquaculture, and ecosystem health; for example plankton growth and oxygen availability. We aim first to identify the key physical processes controlling the climate models' performance in the coastal and shelf seas and we then develop a set of common analysis tools to compare models with observations and theoretical estimates for these processes. Alongside this, we aim to build a broad international network of ocean modellers with an interest in climate impacts in coastal and shelf seas. This will arise through a series of workshops - both virtual and in person, which will aim to demonstrate the approaches developed in project and refine ideas for continuing the network beyond 24-month duration of this project.