Modeling photosynthesis in sea ice-covered waters

The lower trophic levels of marine ecosystems play a critical role in the Earth System mediating fluxes of carbon to the ocean interior. Many of the functional relationships describing biological rate processes, such as primary productivity, in marine ecosystem models are nonlinear functions of environmental state variables. As a result of nonlinearity, rate processes computed from mean fields at coarse resolution will differ from similar computations that incorporate small-scale heterogeneity. Here we examine how subgrid-scale variability in sea ice thickness impacts simulated net primary productivity (NPP) in a 1°×1° configuration of the Community Earth System Model (CESM). CESM simulates a subgrid-scale ice thickness distribution and computes shortwave penetration independently for each ice thickness category. However, the default model formulation uses grid-cell mean irradiance to compute NPP. We demonstrate that accounting for subgrid-scale shortwave heterogeneity by computing light limitation terms under each ice category then averaging the result is a more accurate invocation of the photosynthesis equations. Moreover, this change delays seasonal bloom onset and increases interannual variability in NPP in the sea ice zone in the model. The new treatment reduces annual production by about 32% in the Arctic and 19% in the Antarctic. Our results highlight the importance of considering heterogeneity in physical fields when integrating nonlinear biogeochemical reactions.