| POTENTIAL FEEDBACKS BETWEEN PACIFIC OCEAN ECOSYSTEMS AND INTERDECADAL CLIMATE VARIATIONS (2007) | |||||||||||||||
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| this paper is to motivate a coordinated modeling and observational effort to study coupled physical--biological mechanisms of interdecadal climate variability in the Pacific. (This discussion frequently applies as well to climate processes with interannual and centennial timescales.) HEURISTIC PERSPECTIVE OF BIOLOGY AND CLIMATE. Our current description of the climate system is usually based on a somewhat artificial separation into an external and an internal component. This separation is clear in the case of modern climate models where the external system is specified in the model code (e.g., the shape, size, geography, and rotation rate of the earth; the composition of the atmosphere; etc.) Given this external information, the internal component prognostic variables such as temperatures, winds, precipitation rates, etc., are generated with the governing equations as the model is integrated in time. Biological processes are not part of the internal system of current global coupled climate models used that are externally forced (e.g., Table 9.1, chapter 9 in Houghton et al. 2001). Biological processes are lacking as part of the external system of these models as well (except perhaps as specified features of the land surface such as the roughness and albedo associated with differing vegetation cover). For the oceans, current CGCMs typically do not include biological processes as part of either the internal or external system | |||||||||||||||
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