Biological/physical modeling of upper ocean processes

Abstract

To enhance collaboration between researchers who model upper ocean biological/physical processes, a workshop was held at WHOI on June 7-12, 1993. The workshop was part of our on-going URIP project entitled "Modeling Biological-Physical Interactions: A Population Biological Approach" sponsored by ONR (Grant N000l4-92-J-1527). The two principal goals of the workshop were to: 1) identify critical problems related to mixed-layer biological-physical models, and 2) develop approaches for solving these problems. The workshop was organized into two parts to address these goals. The first part, held over the first day and a half, included three overview presentations given in plenary followed by working groups, organized along disciplinary lines, to identify critical issues. The second part of the workshop consisted of working groups, organized across disciplines, using "hands-on" modeling to address critical aspects of coupled biological-physical models. Several coupled models were presented and/or developed at the workshop addressing specific aspects of both the biological and physical dynamics. These aspects included the different mixed-layer formulations, a structured grazer population model, and an allometric food-web model including microbial-loop dynamics.