Coupling of a sediment diagenesis model (MEDUSA) and an Earth system model (CESM1.2): a contribution toward enhanced marine biogeochemical modelling and long-term climate simulations

• Published in: Geoscientific Model Development
• Main Authors: T. Kurahashi-Nakamura, A. Paul, G. Munhoven, U. Merkel, M. Schulz
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: Copernicus Publications 2020
• Subjects: Geology; QE1-996.5; Medusa; Sea ice
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-13-825-2020; https://doaj.org/article/73871f75dc624a159c26f264ab1dba68

We developed a coupling scheme for the Community Earth System Model version 1.2 (CESM1.2) and the Model of Early Diagenesis in the Upper Sediment of Adjustable complexity (MEDUSA), and explored the effects of the coupling on solid components in the upper sediment and on bottom seawater chemistry by comparing the coupled model's behaviour with that of the uncoupled CESM having a simplified treatment of sediment processes. CESM is a fully coupled atmosphere–ocean–sea-ice–land model and its ocean component (the Parallel Ocean Program version 2; POP2) includes a biogeochemical component (the Biogeochemical Elemental Cycling model; BEC). MEDUSA was coupled to POP2 in an offline manner so that each of the models ran separately and sequentially with regular exchanges of necessary boundary condition fields. This development was done with the ambitious aim of a future application for long-term (spanning a full glacial cycle; i.e. ∼10 5 years) climate simulations with a state-of-the-art comprehensive climate model including the carbon cycle, and was motivated by the fact that until now such simulations have been done only with less-complex climate models. We found that the sediment–model coupling already had non-negligible immediate advantages for ocean biogeochemistry in millennial-timescale simulations. First, the MEDUSA-coupled CESM outperformed the uncoupled CESM in reproducing an observation-based global distribution of sediment properties, especially for organic carbon and opal. Thus, the coupled model is expected to act as a better “bridge” between climate dynamics and sedimentary data, which will provide another measure of model performance. Second, in our experiments, the MEDUSA-coupled model and the uncoupled model had a difference of 0.2 ‰ or larger in terms of δ 13 C of bottom water over large areas, which implied a potentially significant model uncertainty for bottom seawater chemical composition due to a different way of sediment treatment. For example, an ocean model that does not treat sedimentary ...