Many ecosystem models have been developed to study the ocean’s biogeochemical properties, but most of these models use simple formulations to describe light penetration and spectral quality. Here, an optical model is coupled with a previously published ecosystem model that explicitly represents two phytoplankton (picoplankton and diatoms) and two zooplankton functional groups, as well as multip...

The currents, fronts and eddies that comprise the oceanic mesoscale, sometimes referred to as the “internal weather of the sea,” are highly energetic and ubiquitous features of ocean circulation. Dynamical consequences of these phenomena include perturbation of the chemical and biological environment that can dramatically impact biogeochemical cycling in the ocean. The processes that regulate t...

Urban land-use change, the conversion of agricultural and natural ecosystems to human settlements, has become an important component of global change. Virtually all of the projected increase in the world’s population is expected to occur in cities so that by the year 2007 more than half of the global population is expected to live in urban areas (United Nations 2004). Yet, urban settlements and...

There is a growing interest on physical and biogeochemical oceanic hindcasts and forecasts from a wide range of users and businesses. In this contribution we present an operational biogeochemical forecast system for the Portuguese and Galician oceanographic regions, where atmospheric, hydrodynamic and biogeochemical variables are integrated. The ocean model ROMS, with a horizontal resolution of...

[1] We develop a state-space Bayesian framework to combine time-lapse geophysical data with other types of information for quantitative estimation of biogeochemical parameters during bioremediation. We consider characteristics of end products of biogeochemical transformations as state vectors, which evolve under constraints of local environments through evolution equations, and consider time-la...

Earth System Climate Models (ESCMs) are valuable tools that can be used to gain a better understanding of the climate system, global biogeochemical cycles and how anthropogenically-driven changes may affect them. Here we describe improvements made to the marine biogeochemical ecosystem component of the University of Victoria’s ESCM (version 2.9). Major changes include corrections to the code an...

The ocean holds a large reservoir of carbon dioxide (CO2), and mitigates climate change through uptake of anthropogenic CO2. Fluxes of CO2 between the atmosphere and surface ocean are regulated by a number of physical and biogeochemical processes, resulting in a spatiotemporally heterogeneous CO2 distribution. Determining the influence of each individual process is useful for interpreting marin...

Stress within tree roots may influence whole-tree responses to nutrient deficiencies or toxic ion accumulation, but the mechanisms that govern root responses to the belowground chemical environment are poorly quantified. Currently, root production is modeled using rates of forest production and stoichiometry, but this approach alone may be insufficient to forecast variability in forest response...

A three-dimensional ocean biogeochemical model of the tropical Atlantic Ocean was run for more than half a century (1949–2000) in order to characterize the ocean biogeochemical response to variable forcing over this period. The seasonal cycle in the equatorial upwelling zone agrees reasonably well with observations and other published simulations but underestimates phytoplankton biomass under s...