Evaluating Southern Ocean biological production in two ocean biogeochemical models on daily to seasonal timescales using satellite chlorophyll and O2 / Ar observations

• Published in: Biogeosciences
• Main Authors: Jonsson, Bror F., Doney, Scott C., Dunne, John P., Bender, Michael L.
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: unknown
• Published: Copernicus Publications on behalf of the European Geosciences Union 2015
• Subjects: Southern Ocean; Drake Passage; New Zealand
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/1912/7210

© The Author(s), 2015. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License. The definitive version was published in Biogeosciences 12 (2015): 681-695, doi:10.5194/bg-12-681-2015. We assess the ability of ocean biogeochemical models to represent seasonal structures in biomass and net community production (NCP) in the Southern Ocean. Two models are compared to observations on daily to seasonal timescales in four different sections of the region. We use daily satellite fields of chlorophyll (Chl) as a proxy for biomass and in situ observations of O2 and Ar supersaturation (ΔO2 / Ar) to estimate NCP. ΔO2 / Ar is converted to the flux of biologically generated O2 from sea to air (O2 bioflux). All data are aggregated to a climatological year with a daily resolution. To account for potential regional differences within the Southern Ocean, we conduct separate analyses of sections south of South Africa, around the Drake Passage, south of Australia, and south of New Zealand. We find that the models simulate the upper range of Chl concentrations well, underestimate spring levels significantly, and show differences in skill between early and late parts of the growing season. While there is a great deal of scatter in the bioflux observations in general, the four sectors each have distinct patterns that the models pick up. Neither model exhibits a significant distinction between the Australian and New Zealand sectors and between the Drake Passage and African sectors. South of 60° S, the models fail to predict the observed extent of biological O2 undersaturation. We suggest that this shortcoming may be due either to problems with the ecosystem dynamics or problems with the vertical transport of oxygen. This work was supported in part by funding from the National Aeronautic and Space Administration (NASA NNX08AF12G) and the National Science Foundation (NSF OPP-0823101).