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: Kurahashi-Nakamura, Takasumi, Paul, André, Munhoven, Guy, Merkel, Ute, Schulz, Michael
• Other Authors: Sphères - SPHERES
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: Copernicus Gesellschaften 2020
• Subjects: Earth System Model; Sediment; Early Diagenesis; Physical; chemical; mathematical & earth Sciences; Earth sciences & physical geography; Physique; chimie; mathématiques & sciences de la terre; Sciences de la terre & géographie physique; Sea ice
• Online Access: https://orbi.uliege.be/handle/2268/244410; https://orbi.uliege.be/bitstream/2268/244410/1/gmd-2019-231.pdf; https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-13-825-2020

peer reviewed 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 (BEC). MEDUSA was coupled to POP2 in an off-line 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., ~ 100000 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-time-scale 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 δ13C of bottom water over large areas, which implied potential significant model biases for bottom seawater chemical composition due to a different way of sediment treatment. Such a model bias would be a fundamental issue for paleo model–data comparison often relying on data ...