Deoxygenation in the global and coastal ocean: challenges of observing and modelling low oxygen zones
Dr Marilaure Grégoire, University of Liège
Tuesday 19 June, 13:00 GMT/UTC
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The IOC-Unesco Global Ocean Oxygen Network (GO2NE)
Since about 1960, ocean deoxygenation is occurring in the coastal and global ocean and is expected to worsen in a warming world with consequences on living organisms and on regional and global budgets of essential elements. Better understanding of the deoxygenation process can be achieved by access to accurate observations and to furthering the reliability and coupling capabilities of physical, biogeochemical, plankton and benthic foodweb, and upper trophic level models. Rapid advancement is being made in each of the modeling types, as well as in how best to couple them, in order to generate “climate to fish” models (e.g. Rose et al. 2010) that include oxygen effects. A regular monitoring of the state of the ocean with respect to oxygen based on observations and modelling offers new knowledge on the fundamental processes like global circulation, photosynthesis, respiration and interactions with the atmosphere. Oxygen maps (climatologies) are regularly produced for the global ocean based essentially on ship based data (e.g. Stramma et al., 2008, Schmidtko et al., 2017). Once quality checked, the oxygen time series delivered by Argo floats have the potential to enhance these climatologies by providing a high frequency signal. The lack of openly available oxygen data from the coastal ocean in a centralized database prevents a similar global mapping of oxygen for the coastal ocean.
The success of combating deoxygenation relies on our capacity to understand and anticipate its consequences in an environment affected by local, regional, and global processes. State-of-the-art models have capabilities to simulate the deoxygenation process in the global and coastal ocean, and their parameterizations and skill (validation) should continuously evolve and improve. Model development needs new observations and dedicated experiments, in particular in low oxygen and anoxic waters that are particularly challenging to measure and to model. Oxygen levels act as a “switch” for nutrient cycling and availability. The detailed nature of these thresholds and their ecological and biogeochemical implications are still a matter of intense scientific investigation.
A process that engages a dialogue between decision makers and scientists is necessary to foster communication between the two communities and to assure the saliency of model predictions. Recently, IOC-Unesco established the Global Ocean Oxygen Network (GO2NE), a global network of ocean oxygen scientists, including experimentalists, modelers and field scientists, to promote scientific collaboration and public outreach (e.g., Breitburg et al., 2018).
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