From nutrients to fish: Impacts of mesoscale processes in a global CESM-FEISTY eddying ocean model framework

Abstract

The ocean sustains ecosystems that are essential for human livelihood and habitability of the planet. The ocean holds an enormous amount of carbon, and serves as a critical source of nutrition for human societies worldwide. Climate variability and change impact marine biogeochemistry and ecosystems. Thus, having state-of-the-art simulations of the ocean, which include marine biogeochemistry and ecosystems, is critical for understanding the role of climate variability and change on the ocean biosphere. Here we present a novel global eddy-resolving (0.1° horizontal resolution) simulation of the ocean and sea ice, including ocean biogeochemistry, performed with the Community Earth System Model (CESM). The simulation is forced by the atmospheric dataset based on the Japanese Reanalysis (JRA-55) product over the 1958–2021 period. We present a novel configuration of the CESM marine ecosystem model in this simulation which includes two zooplankton classes: microzooplankton and mesozooplankton. This novel planktonic food web structure facilitates “offline” coupling with the Fisheries Size and Functional Type (FEISTY) model. FEISTY is a size- and trait-based model of fish functional types contributing to fisheries. We present an evaluation of the ocean biogeochemistry, marine ecosystem (including fish types), and sea ice in this high resolution simulation compared to available observations and a corresponding low resolution (nominal 1°) simulation. Our analysis offers insights into environmental controls on trophodynamics within the ocean. We find that this high resolution simulation provides a realistic reconstruction of nutrients, oxygen, sea ice, plankton and fish distributions over the global ocean. On global and large regional scales the high resolution simulation is comparable to the standard 1° simulation, but on smaller scales, explicitly resolving the mesoscale dynamics is shown to be important for accurately capturing trophodynamic structuring, especially in coastal ecosystems. We show that fine-scale ocean features leave imprints on ocean ecosystems, from plankton to fish, from the tropics to polar regions. This simulation also offers insights on ocean acidification over the past 64 years, as well as how large-scale climate variations may impact upper trophic levels. The data generated by the simulations are publicly available and will be a fruitful community resource for a large variety of oceanographic science questions.