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

海洋对社会、生态系统和地球健康具有极其重要的意义。然而，它们面临着多重威胁。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，如海冰覆盖的减少，但另一些变化是微妙的，很难观察到，如初级产量、水质量分布和淡水含量。加拿大北极地区的一个地区尤其受到气候变化的威胁：位于巴芬湾北部的北水冰湖，以极地世界最具生产力的生态系统而闻名。在过去的几十年里，几次协调的科学运动提供了大量的数据。同时，高性能计算和大规模并行化数值模型的出现，增强了我们在日益现实的条件下解决地球物理流体动力学问题和气候不同组分之间耦合相互作用的能力。因此，本提案的目标是通过使用强大的数值模拟综合能力，显著提高我们对这一海洋系统的理解。更具体地说，我们将试图回答这个问题：北水生态系统将如何在变化的气候中进化？通过关注三种重要的过程：多冰复合体中的海冰动力学和热力学，影响水质量分布和演化的过程，以及湍流环境中生物地球化学相互作用的表现。

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.