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Supplementary material to “Understanding Global Climate Variability and Its Effects on Marine Ecosystems”
17 November 2009
James W. Hurrell, National Center for Atmospheric Research, Boulder, Colorado
Citation:
Hurrell, J. W. (2009), Understanding global climate variability and its effects on marine ecosystems, Eos Trans. AGU, 90(46), 429. [Full Article (pdf)]
Despite evidence of significant impacts from climate change, relatively few published papers in ecology, conservation biology, and biodiversity research deal with marine systems, in part because of a lower capacity to observe world marine ecosystems and because multiple stressors make it difficult to isolate how climate change affects them. These stark facts mandate closer attention to ocean ecosystems, and they motivated a summer colloquium for graduate students entitled "Ecosystems and Climate: Modeling and Analysis of Observed Variability in Marine Ecosystems." The colloquium was hosted by the Advanced Study Program (ASP) at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR).
The goal of the colloquium was to prepare a next cohort of graduate students to undertake research studies on understanding and predicting global climate variability and its impacts on marine ecosystems. An invited group of 18 international experts worked closely with 26 students from the climate, marine ecosystem and impact communities. The experts presented lectures on topics including: the response of benthic, coastal and open-ocean ecosystems to climate change; modes of tropical and extratropical climate variability; statistical analysis techniques; earth system and regional ocean modeling; and fisheries, marine protected areas, and other socio-economic issues. An accompanying set of computer-based tutorials was designed to give the students an in-depth understanding of the models and analysis methods available to tackle these cross-disciplinary research problems.
An important portion of the colloquium was devoted to four hands-on projects that allowed the students, working in teams, to put into practice the research approaches introduced in the lectures and tutorials. A first project involved the use of an individual-based-model, coupled to a coastal circulation model, to explore how trajectories of simulated mesozooplankton might be altered under different upwelling and micronutrient limitation scenarios. Though the effects were not large, over a full season significantly different spatial patterns arose from the various limitation scenarios. A second project examined the inherent (unforced) variability in a coupled climate-biogeochemical model. Global teleconnections associated with the El Niño/Southern Oscillation (ENSO) phenomenon were reasonably well simulated, and ENSO events strongly impacted the biogeochemistry in the tropical Pacific Ocean with an increase in phytoplankton and zooplankton biomass during La Niña. The third project applied a regional ocean circulation model coupled to a 10-component lower trophic level biological model to investigate the biological consequences of deep-water pumping, which has been proposed as a hurricane deterrent in the Gulf of Mexico during summertime. Results showed that such a strategy might produce significant changes to the surface-layer ecosystem, possibly comparable in importance to the ecological effects of the hurricane itself. A final project used coupled climate model projections to test how differing rates of coral adaptation to temperature impacted bleaching frequency in the 21st Century. The analysis found that, if coral temperature tolerance is determined by the temperature history of the coral, then fast adaptation rates (e.g., a temperature tolerance set by the previous 10 year period) were not always an advantage.
Additional information on the NCAR ASP summer colloquium series is available from http://www.asp.ucar.edu/colloquium/summer_colloquia.php. Presentations and other materials from the 2009 summer colloquium on marine ecosystems and climate are available from http://www.cgd.ucar.edu/events/marine/.
Acknowledgements
The meeting was sponsored by the ASP and the Climate and Global Dynamics Division (CGD) of NCAR, with support from the National Science Foundation (NSF), the World Climate Research Programme (WCRP), the Climate Variability and Predictability (CLIVAR) Project of WCRP, and the Global Ocean Ecosystem Dynamics (GLOBEC) Project.
James W. Hurrell, NCAR, USA: Email: jhurrell@ucar.edu
Mike Alexander, NOAA, USA
Dale Haidvogel, Rutgers University
Joanie Kleypas, NCAR, USA
Keith Lindsay, NCAR, USA
Thomas Powell, University of California, Berkeley, USA