Modeling photosynthesis in sea ice-covered waters

Many of the functional relationships describing biological rate processes, such as primary productivity, in marine ecosystem models are nonlinear functions of environmental state variables. As a result of nonlinearity, rate processes computed from mean fields at coarse resolution will differ from similar computations that incorporate small-scale heterogeneity.

Here we examine how subgrid-scale variability in sea ice thickness impacts simulated net primary productivity (NPP) in a inline image configuration of the Community Earth System Model (CESM). CESM simulates a subgrid-scale ice thickness distribution and computes shortwave penetration independently for each ice thickness category. However, the default model formulation uses grid-cell mean irradiance to compute NPP.