Global conservation of carbon using WOMBAT-mid

Earth System Earth System Model
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@tiloz @pearseb : To record/connect some conversations that happened during the ACCESS-evaluation hackathon.

(I understand that) The WOMBAT-mid updates involve the use of prescribed riverine sources of stuff (DOC, DIC, silicate). If WOMBAT-mid is in scope for ACCESS-ESM1.6/3 then we would need to consider if/how to connect those sources of carbon as sinks in the terrestrial carbon cycle. If left unaddressed these terms would represent unaccounted for sources of carbon (at the global scale) and it would (should) impact how the PI spin up equilibrates (unless there’s an exact balance with the burial sink). There is no obvious means to connect land to ocean together for these terms as the MOSES/JULES river schemes do not carry tracers.

We ended up with similar problems with the CM2-era iceberg scheme and landed on a position (via calibration) where global conservation applied and global ocean volume was steady but the local balances didn’t - i.e. there is likely to be a way around this (with a bit of thought).

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Yes thanks for raising this Ian.

Level 1: My first thought is that the riverine fluxes could be abandoned if it’s too hard and/or too far down the wish list.

Level 2: They are definitely not in equilibrium with the burial sink at the moment, but nonetheless this flux could be saved and then distributed to the rivers if we wanted to make the ocean carbon inputs == outputs. Then, we don’t require any interface with the land for balancing carbon.

Level 3: We interface with the land and make the whole thing balance :grimacing:.

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