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，他们遭受了多重威胁。尤其是北冰洋正在经历迅速而深刻的变化，这可能导致区域和全球环境发生不可逆转的变化。其中一些变化是可见的，很容易观察到，比如海冰覆盖率的下降，但另一些变化是微妙的，很难观察到，比如初级生产力、水团分布和淡水含量。加拿大北极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波利尼亚，被认为是极地世界最具生产力的生态系统。在过去的几十年里，几个协调一致的科学运动提供了大量的数据。同时，高性能计算和数值模式大规模并行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成部分之间的耦合作用的能力。因此，这项提议的目标是通过使用强大的数值模拟综合能力，大大促进我们对这一海洋系统的了解。更具体地说，我们将试图回答这样一个问题：北水生态系统将如何在气候变化中演变？通过重点研究三类重要的过程：波尼亚复合体中的海冰动力学和热力学，影响水团分布和演化的过程，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.