BIOLOGICAL CARBON PUMP ASSESSMENT USING THE TRANSPORT MATRIX METHOD AND GLOBAL NUTRIENT DISTRIBUTIONS (BATMAN)

海洋生物在地球气候中起着关键作用。为了生长，海藻每年从大气中吸收的二氧化碳几乎与陆地上的所有植物一样多。这种“初级生产”为海洋生态系统提供燃料。由此产生的废物以出口的形式下沉，在远离大气的深处隔离了大量的碳。大气中的二氧化碳水平可能对废物回收(或再矿化)成营养物质的深度的微小变化非常敏感。我们对下沉物质有足够的观测，可以调查再矿化的过程，但远远不足以制作出可用于测试气候模型的全球地图。我们确实有这样的养分分布图，这是再矿化的结果，但传统上，模型运行太长时间才能进行这样的比较。一种新技术(传输矩阵法)提供了一种更快地运行模型的方法。随着这一技术的发展，近年来对控制出口过程的机制有了更好的了解。因此，现在是联合这些最新进展以确保气候模型准确地捕捉地球系统这一关键过程的时候了。

Marine life plays a key role in the Earth's climate. To grow, marine algae extract almost as much carbon dioxide from the atmosphere annually as all plants on land. This 'primary production' fuels the marine ecosystem. The resulting waste sinks, as 'export', sequestering large amounts of carbon at depth, away from the atmosphere. Atmospheric carbon dioxide levels can be very sensitive to small changes in the depth at which recycling (or 'remineralisation') of this waste back into nutrients takes place. We have sufficient observations of sinking material to investigate the process of remineralisation but far from enough to produce a global map that could be used to test climate models. We do have such maps for nutrient distributions, that are the consequence of the remineralisation, but traditionally models take too long to run to allow such comparisons. A new technique (the Transport Matrix method) provides a means of running models much faster. In tandem with this technical development, the mechanisms controlling the process of export have become much better understood in recent years. It is timely therefore to unite these recent advances to ensure that climate models accurately capture this key process of the Earth system.