Abstract
Abstract. The marine impacts of climate change on our societies will be largely felt through coastal waters and shelf seas. These impacts involve sectors as diverse as tourism, fisheries and energy production. Projections of future marine climate change come from global models. Modelling at the global scale is required to capture the feedbacks and large-scale transport of physical properties such as heat, which occur within the climate system, but global models currently cannot provide detail in the shelf seas. Version 2 of the regional implementation of the Shelf Sea Physics and Primary Production (S2P3-R v2.0) model bridges the gap between global projections and local shelf-sea impacts. S2P3-R v2.0 is a highly simplified coastal shelf model, computationally efficient enough to be run across the shelf seas of the whole globe. Despite the simplified nature of the model, it can display regional skill comparable to state-of-the-art models, and at the scale of the global (excluding high latitudes) shelf seas it can explain >50 % of the interannual sea surface temperature (SST) variability in ∼60 % of grid cells and >80 % of interannual variability in ∼20 % of grid cells. The model can be run at any resolution for which the input data can be supplied, without expert technical knowledge, and using a modest off-the-shelf computer. The accessibility of S2P3-R v2.0 places it within reach of an array of coastal managers and policy makers, allowing it to be run routinely once set up and evaluated for a region under expert guidance. The computational efficiency and relative scientific simplicity of the tool make it ideally suited to educational applications. S2P3-R v2.0 is set up to be driven directly with output from reanalysis products or daily atmospheric output from climate models such as those which contribute to the sixth phase of the Climate Model Intercomparison Project, making it a valuable tool for semi-dynamical downscaling of climate projections. The updates introduced into version 2.0 of this model are primarily focused around the ability to geographical relocate the model, model usability and speed but also scientific improvements. The value of this model comes from its computational efficiency, which necessitates simplicity. This simplicity leads to several limitations, which are discussed in the context of evaluation at regional and global scales.
Highlights
The world’s coastal oceans are under increasing pressure from human activity (Doney, 2010)
The initial spatial implementation of S2P3 (S2P3-R v1.0) focused on what could be achieved by running S2P3 in a regional sense and as such provided Bash scripts which ran individual instances of the 1-D model for each of the latitude–longitude locations specified in a domain file containing depth and tidal forcing data
We find that S2P3-R v2.0 replicates the average values and interannual variability in bottom water temperatures in the North Sea, English Channel and Irish Sea captured by the AMM15 model (Graham et al, 2018) with biases of less than 0.5 K and R2 values of 0.92, 0.84 and 0.93 the North Sea, English Channel and Irish Sea, respectively (Fig. 12)
Summary
The world’s coastal oceans are under increasing pressure from human activity (Doney, 2010). Global circulation and Earth system model projections contain neither the spatial resolution nor processes required to simulate shelf seas (Holt et al, 2009). These models have been found to contain little to no skill at simulating patterns of surface temperature warming at spatial scales lower than 1000 km (Kwiatkowski et al, 2014). Surface PAR is set to 45 % of the net downwelling surface shortwave radiation, and this decays as a function of phytoplankton concentration and an attenuation coefficient which is dependent on whether the water column is mixed or stratified (Sharples, 2008). In its original form, S2P3 was driven by sinusoidal time series of surface air temperature and pressure, relative humidity, total cloud cover and u and v surface winds
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