Newly developed model code and scripts for the coupling of CESM1.2 and MEDUSA

DOI

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., ~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-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 permil or larger in terms of d13C 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 derived from benthic foraminifera.

Supplement to: Kurahashi-Nakamura, Takasumi; Paul, André; Munhoven, Guy; Merkel, Ute; Schulz, Michael (2020): 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. Geoscientific Model Development, 13(2), 825-840

Identifier
DOI https://doi.org/10.1594/PANGAEA.905821
Related Identifier https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-13-825-2020
Metadata Access https://ws.pangaea.de/oai/provider?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=datacite4&identifier=oai:pangaea.de:doi:10.1594/PANGAEA.905821
Provenance
Creator Kurahashi-Nakamura, Takasumi ORCID logo; Paul, André (ORCID: 0000-0003-1961-139X); Munhoven, Guy; Merkel, Ute ORCID logo; Schulz, Michael ORCID logo
Publisher PANGAEA
Publication Year 2019
Rights Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International; https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
OpenAccess true
Representation
Language English
Resource Type Supplementary Dataset; Dataset
Format text/tab-separated-values
Size 15 data points
Discipline Earth System Research