Data supporting publication "OCEAN BIOGEOCHEMICAL EXTREMES AND COMPOUND EVENTS"

We use a 500-yr preindustrial control simulation with prescribed atmospheric CO2 concentrations at 286 ppm, as well as a historical simulation over the 1861-2005 period followed by a high (RCP8.5; RCP: Representative concentration pathway) simulation over the 2006-2100 period with prescribed atmospheric CO2 and non-CO2 greenhouse and natural forcing (Burger et al., 2020). The RCP8.5 scenario is a high emission scenario without effective climate policies, leading to continued growth in greenhouse gas emissions.

Part II: regional model results from ROMS-BEC: The 2013-2015 “Blob” event was analyzed using hindcast simulations of the telescopic North Pacific setup of ROMS-BEC by ref((Frischknecht et al., 2017)). Briefly, the model system consists of the Regional Oceanic Modeling System (ROMS)(Shchepetkin & McWilliams, 2005) coupled to an updated version of the Biogeochemical/Ecological Model (BEC)(Moore et al., 2002). BEC explicitly resolves the cycling of four nutrient elements, which limit the growth of three phytoplankton functional groups, which are being kept under control by the grazing of a single zooplankton functional group.

The model domain covers the entire Pacific, but has a strong resolution refinement toward the U.S. West Coast, with most of the area of interest having a resolution of 10 kilometers or better. The model was initialized from observations, and then run through the period 1970 to 2016 using daily fields of wind stress, solar short-wave radiation, and fluxes of heat and freshwater from ERA Interim(D. P. Dee et al., 2011).