EFFECTS OF ATMOSPHERE-OCEAN INTERACTIONS ON OCEAN NITROGEN CYCLE: A CASE IN SOUTHERN CHILE

Abstract

 We conducted hindcast over the southern region of Chile using ROMS-NPZD, a regional ocean physical-biological model to investigate the effect of regional atmosphere-ocean interaction on the ocean nitrogen cycle. Firstly, the validation of the regional atmospheric model RSM and the regional atmosphere-ocean coupled model RSM-ROMS showed that RSM-ROMS captured the seasonal and daily variations of observations of terrestrial variables, and the feedback of the atmosphere-ocean interaction reduced the error compared to that of RSM, while the error of sea surface temperature increased. Next, we validated the experiments using the atmospheric field of RSM and RSM-ROMS as boundary conditions for ROMS-NPZD (UCPL and CPL) by comparing with satellite observations, CPL captured a tendency of the deviation of chlorophyll-a concentration from the annual mean, but the error of the horizontal distribution became larger then that of UCPL. It is also suggested that the feedback of atmosphere-ocean interactions may affect the ocean circulation field through the light environment.