Relevance Of Modeling Biophysical models are one tool needed to address the question of how climate change may affect marine populations in eastern boundary current regions. While we don't know the specific changes in atmospheric circulation and oceanic large-scale temperature and velocity structure that will result from climate change, models provide the necessary tools for examining the response of biophysical systems to hypothesized changes in forcing. Considerable model development, evaluation and improvement are needed before such model experiments can be interpreted with confidence, which necessitates the early initiation of modeling activities. The interaction between the modeling and the observational efforts during the project will be crucial to the success of the program. Furthermore, for each hypothesized biophysical mechanism, a series of numerical experiments can be designed to assess whether the proposed dynamics are consistent with all available information.
Models also allow the examination of a variety of scales of biophysical interaction.
The following questions can be addressed with modeling studies, in conjunction with the field work, monitoring and retrospective data analysis elements of this program. Progress in physical models that realistically incorporate mixed-layer dynamics has also provided hope for investigating the physical response of the CCS to changes in forcing due to global climate change. However, much remains to be done in developing and validating models that span the wide range of physical scales necessary to link local populations to large-scale environmental changes. That development and validation is best done, we believe, within a program which has the ultimate goal of application to real biophysical problems, since those applications themselves often reveal model behavior at odds with observations. Initial biophysical models include the combination of models of individual plankton growth and mortality with circulation models.