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

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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.