Multi-compartment Chemistry Transport Models

Abstract

There exists a large range of pollutants of global concern for whom the ocean is a key part in their environmental cycle. Namely, mercury (Hg) and several persistent organic pollutants (POPs) which are subject to international treaties (e.g. Minamata Convention, Stockholm Convention) are actively exchanged between atmosphere and ocean and subsequently accumulated in the marine food web. Thus, modeling their environmental fate requires a numerical representation of atmospheric and marine physics and chemistry. Additionally, in the marine environment interactions with biota and detritus are an important factor leading to a multi-disciplinary biogeochemical research field involving chemistry, meteorology, oceanography, and biology. However, the chemistry transport modeling research community is still virtually limited to atmospheric transport and transformation of pollutants. The ocean is typically treated as a boundary condition and only few coupled hydrodynamic models have been developed so far.