WACO · West African Coastal Ocean - Finescale physics, biogeochemistry and climate change
Horizon 2020 — Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions
- Duration
- 2018-03-01 → 2020-02-29
- EU contribution
- €173,076
- Participants
- 1
- Scheme
- MSCA-IF-EF-ST
Lines connect the coordinator with its partners.
Results in brief
West African Coastal Ocean - Finescale physics, biogeochemistry and climate change
Eastern boundary upwelling systems (EBUS) are located along the west coasts of the Americas and Africa, where strong equatorward winds promote cold and nutrient rich waters to be brought to the surface - a process called upwelling. The injection of nutrients to the sunlit surface layer enables proliferation of phytoplankton and makes upwelling regions some of the ocean’s most biologically productive regimes. They constitute less than 1% of the total ocean area, but account for nearly 20% of global fish catch. EBUS are hotspots of global climate change. Regional and more localized changes are expected in wind forcing, temperature as well as stratification. Deoxygenation and acidification will be additional sources of stress for EBUS ecosystems. However, fine-scale “chaotic” details of the oceanic circulation, with horizontal sizes between ~ 1 and 100 km arising from the turbulent nature of ocean flows can modulate biogeochemical changes in ways that are poorly understood until today. In addition, the effects of fine-scale ocean turbulence may be different in each EBUS. West African (WA) societies such as Senegal, Mauritania and Guinea depend heavily on a healthy ocean which provides food and employment. For example in Senegal, small fish mainly caught close to the shores by artisanal fisherman is the most important source of animal protein for the population. In a perspective of adaptive management, it is key to understand how climate change is impacting these resources and ecosystem services. To provide robust and reliable projections of the future states of the WA coastal ocean, the interactions between fine-scale ocean turbulence and biogeochemistry has to be understood and accounted for. WACO aims to clarify the role of fine-scale physical processes in the present-day functioning and future evolutions of the WA coastal ocean, including its biogeochemical cycles.
Data: CORDIS, © European Union
Project objective
Coastal oceans are essential to our societies but their health status is degrading rapidly in many parts of the world. Anticipating or remedying environmental evolutions/degradations, including those resulting from global changes, is particularly difficult. This is largely because the knowledge and information we currently have on the ocean functioning do not encompass scales finer than a few tens of kilometers, which is notably insufficient close to shores. WACO will clarify the role of fine-scale processes (turbulent and wave processes with scales < 10 km) in the present-day functioning and future evolutions of the West African coastal dynamics and biogeochemistry. To do so, it will take advantage of a new generation of ocean models that is truly apt to simulate coastal dynamics/biogeochemistry/ecosystems in a fully integrated and multi-scale manner. Precisely, the project will be focused on the senegalese and mauritanian coastal oceans from which state-of-the-art ocean observations are available to complement and evaluate the modelling effort, a robust and interdisciplinary collaborative framework, and unmatched opportunities for social benefits of the research. The project relies on a massively parallel computing plan that will serve as a demanding training ground for the applicant. Overall WACO will contribute to a deeper understanding of climate change, which is a key goal of EU research.
Original text from CORDIS.
Participants
- SORBONNE UNIVERSITE · ParisCoordinatorFrance
Links
Data: CORDIS, © European Union