S. Doney, PI
The PAL site and its data offer a unique context for building, testing and applying numerical models of marine ecosystem dynamics spanning a wide range of trophic interactions and in a region of substantial natural and anthropogenic climate change. It also provides an important end-member for comparison with other marine ecosystems. The modeling and synthesis component helps integrate the individual field and remote sensing observational efforts, quantifies mechanisms, and develops future
projections for the response of the WAP ecosystem to climate change. The biological-chemical- physical modeling component will involve a combination of three complementary research tools, pursued in parallel: forward and inverse box models, a generalized vertical 1-D modeling framework and a 3-D regional ocean general circulation model. The box models and 1-D model will be used for data analysis, development of new model components and exploration of specific hypotheses. The 3-D work will build from lessons learned in 0-D and 1-D and will be used to interpret and provide a spatial-temporal context for the field observations and to examine biological-physical signals arising from natural climate variability and climate change.
This site was developed with the support of the National Science Foundation under Grant No. OPP-2026045. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.