Assessing the impact of climate change on the North Water polynya ecosystem: an integrated numerical modeling approach

海洋对于社会、生态系统和地球的健康至关重要。然而，他们受到多重威胁。特别是北冰洋，正在经历迅速而深刻的变化，可能导致区域和全球不可逆转的环境变化。其中一些变化是可见的，很容易观察到，如海冰覆盖的下降，但其他一些变化是微妙的，难以观察，如初级生产，水团分布和淡水含量。加拿大北极地区的一个地区特别受到气候变化的威胁：位于巴芬湾北方的北水冰间湖，被誉为极地世界最具生产力的生态系统。在过去的几十年里，几次协调一致的科学活动提供了大量的数据。与此同时，高性能计算和大规模并行数值模型的出现，提高了我们解决地球物理流体动力学问题的能力，并在日益现实的条件下，气候的不同组成部分之间的耦合相互作用。因此，本提案的目标是通过使用数值模拟的强大综合能力，大大推进我们对这个海洋系统的理解。更具体地说，我们将试图回答这个问题：在气候变化的情况下，北水生态系统将如何演变？通过集中在三个重要的过程：海冰动力学和热力学在冰间湖复合体，影响水的质量分布和演变的过程，以及在湍流环境中的地球化学相互作用的代表。

Oceans have a capital importance for societies, ecosystems and the health of the planet. They suffer, however, multiple threats. The Arctic Ocean, in particular, is subject to rapid and profound transformations that could lead to irreversible environmental changes regionally and globally. Some of these changes are visible and easily observed, like the decline of the sea ice cover, but some others are subtle and difficult to observe, like primary production, water mass distributions, and freshwater content. One region of the Canadian Arctic is particularly threatened by climate change: the North Water polynya, located in northern Baffin Bay, is renown as the most productive ecosystem of the polar world. In the last decades, several coordinated scientific campaigns provided an outstanding amount of data. At the same time, the advent of high performance computing and large-scale parallelism in numerical models have enhanced our capacity to solve geophysical fluid dynamics problems and coupled interactions between the different components of the climate in increasingly realistic conditions. The goal of this proposal is thus to make significant significantly advance our understanding of this marine system through the use of the powerful integrative capabilities of numerical modeling. More specifically, we will try to answer the question How will the North Water ecosystem evolve in a changing climate? By focusing on three important classes of processes: sea ice dynamics and thermodynamics in a polynya complex, processes affecting the water mass distribution and evolution, and the representation of biogeochemical interactions in a turbulent environment.