Climate change in a conceptual atmosphere–plankton model

Abstract. We develop a conceptual coupled atmosphere–phytoplankton model by combining the Lorenz\u002784 general circulation model and the logistic population growth model under the condition of a climate change due to a linear time dependence of the strength of anthropogenic atmospheric forcing. The following types of couplings are taken into account: (a) the temperature modifies the total biomass of phytoplankton via the carrying capacity, (b) the extraction of carbon dioxide by phytoplankton slows down the speed of climate change, (c) the strength of mixing/turbulence in the oceanic mixing layer is in correlation with phytoplankton productivity. We carry out an ensemble approach (in the spirit of the theory of snapshot attractors) and concentrate on the trends of the average phytoplankton concentration and average temperature contrast between the pole and equator, forcing the atmospheric dynamics. The effect of turbulence is found to have the strongest influence on these trends. Our results show that (a) sufficiently strong mixing is able to force the typical phytoplankton concentration to always decay globally in time, and the temperature contrast to decrease faster than what follows from direct anthropogenic influences. Simple relations found for the trends without this coupling do, however, remain valid, just the coefficients become dependent on the strength of coupling with oceanic mixing. In particular, the phytoplankton concentration and its coupling to climate is found to modify the trend of global warming, and is able to make it stronger than what it would be without biomass.