Response of ocean ecosystems to climate warming

• Published in: Global Biogeochemical Cycles
• Main Authors: Sarmiento, Jorge L., Slater, Richard D., Barber, Richard T., Bopp, Laurent, Doney, Scott C., Hirst, A. C., Kleypas, Joan A., Matear, Richard J., Mikolajewicz, U., Monfray, Patrick, Soldatov, V., Spall, S. A., Stouffer, R.
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: American Geophysical Union 2004
• Subjects: Climate warming; Ocean biogeochemistry; Antarctic; Pacific; Southern Ocean; The Antarctic; Antarc*; North Atlantic; Sea ice
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/1912/3392

Author Posting. © American Geophysical Union, 2004. This article is posted here by permission of American Geophysical Union for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Global Biogeochemical Cycles 18 (2004): GB3003, doi:10.1029/2003GB002134. We examine six different coupled climate model simulations to determine the ocean biological response to climate warming between the beginning of the industrial revolution and 2050. We use vertical velocity, maximum winter mixed layer depth, and sea ice cover to define six biomes. Climate warming leads to a contraction of the highly productive marginal sea ice biome by 42% in the Northern Hemisphere and 17% in the Southern Hemisphere, and leads to an expansion of the low productivity permanently stratified subtropical gyre biome by 4.0% in the Northern Hemisphere and 9.4% in the Southern Hemisphere. In between these, the subpolar gyre biome expands by 16% in the Northern Hemisphere and 7% in the Southern Hemisphere, and the seasonally stratified subtropical gyre contracts by 11% in both hemispheres. The low-latitude (mostly coastal) upwelling biome area changes only modestly. Vertical stratification increases, which would be expected to decrease nutrient supply everywhere, but increase the growing season length in high latitudes. We use satellite ocean color and climatological observations to develop an empirical model for predicting chlorophyll from the physical properties of the global warming simulations. Four features stand out in the response to global warming: (1) a drop in chlorophyll in the North Pacific due primarily to retreat of the marginal sea ice biome, (2) a tendency toward an increase in chlorophyll in the North Atlantic due to a complex combination of factors, (3) an increase in chlorophyll in the Southern Ocean due primarily to the retreat of and changes at the northern boundary of the marginal sea ice zone, and (4) a tendency toward a decrease in chlorophyll adjacent to the Antarctic continent due primarily to ...