CMCC Talks
21 September 2026, 14:00 CEST
To join the webinar, register here
Speaker: Marie-Lou Bachelery, CMCC
Moderator: Lorenzo Mentaschi, CMCC
Polar oceans regulate exchanges of carbon and nutrients between the atmosphere, the ocean and marine ecosystems, playing a key role in the global carbon cycle. Yet their biogeochemistry is among the most challenging components to represent in global Earth System Models: strong seasonality, sea ice, and tightly coupled physical and biological processes are only partially captured by current-generation models, introducing biases in simulated ecosystem dynamics and uncertainty in their response to climate change.
This talk presents ongoing efforts to improve the representation of polar marine biogeochemistry in the CMCC Earth System Model, focusing on two complementary developments: a more realistic treatment of light transmission through snow and sea ice, which controls under-ice light availability and biological production, and the first implementation of a sea-ice biogeochemical component in the CMCC ESM.Together, these developments move sea ice from a passive physical boundary to an active component of polar marine ecosystems and the carbon cycle.