Marine ecosystems are fundamental components of the Earth system, providing valuable ecosystems services. However, human activities have drastically changed the structure and functioning, as well as the health and productivity of oceans and coastal regions.
In the context of the recent Administrative Arrangement BLUE2 (2023-2026) between the Directorate General Environment (DG-ENV) of the European Commission and the Joint Research Center (JRC) the combined impacts of several policy developments on the marine ecosystem in a climate change context will be assessed using ocean models.
The project applied here for computational resources to perform multidecadal experiments (2015 – 2055) using JRC-NWES, a high resolution coupled ocean circulation - biogeochemical model configuration of the North West European Shelf. The JRC-NWES configuration is based on the ocean circulation GETM module and the biogeochemical ERSEM module. Both modules are widely used in the marine modelling community and have been previously implemented and validated at JRC.
This project will extend previous experiments by forcing the GETM-ERSEM model using atmosphere fields derived from climate projections in order to evaluate the impacts of different policy options on the regional ecosystem.