Atmosphere-sea fluxes of nutrients and gases

Author

Fulton, Beth (Environment, Hobart)

Published

October 8, 2014

Nutrient atmosphere-sea flux

Atlantis has always allowed for atmospheric deposition of NH and NO. We’ve now made that explicit (i.e. parameters in physics.prm) and added the capacity to have P, CO2, Si and micronutrients flux too.

This new functionality is optional. You can turn it on by adding the following to your physics prm file:

include_atmosphere 1

If you have an existing model you should probably turn this off, ie:

include_atmosphere 0

To ensure that you get results consistent with your past results.

If this functionality is turned on the following parameters should be added to physics.prm

Atmospheric concentrations of gases or dust based inputs (mg m-3)

atmospheric_NH 0.017

atmospheric_NO 0.025

atmospheric_F 0.0

atmospheric_CO2 0.0

atmospheric_P 0.0

atmospheric_Si 0.0

In the code all of these fluxes are implemented as follows:

If it is a surface layer then

localWCFlux_nutrient += (atmospheric_XX / layer_depth) / 86400      (with the last bit to make sure its per second so in correct units for the integrator)

Oxygen atmosphere-sea flux

We’ve added explicit temperature-dependent atmosphere-sea flux for oxygen too. This uses a relationship

calculated off Figure 1 in Gruber et al Global Biogeochemical Cycles paper “Air-sea flux of oxygen estimated from bulk data:

Implications for the marine and atmospheric oxygen cycles”

You need to add the following param to the physics.prm

atmospheric_O2   198.9

In the code the flux is implemented as follows: if it is a surface layer then

localWCFlux_o2 += ((atmospheric_O2 - 0.0008 * H2Otemp^4 + 0.0594 * H2Otemp^3 - 1.1908 * H2Otemp^2 + 0.613 * H2Otemp) / layer_depth) / 86400


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