OceanBioME.jl: A flexible environment for modelling the coupled interactions between ocean biogeochemistry and physics

Abstract

OceanBioME.jl is a flexible modelling environment written in Julia (Bezanson et al., 2017) for simulating the coupled interactions between ocean biogeochemistry, carbonate chemistry, and physics. OceanBioME.jl can be used as a stand-alone box model, or integrated into Oceananigans.jl for coupled physical-biogeochemical simulations in one, two, or three dimensions. As a result, OceanBioME.jl and Oceananigans.jl can be used to simulate the biogeochemical response across an enormous range of scales: from surface boundary layer turbulence at the sub-meter scale to eddying global ocean simulations at the planetary scale, and on computational systems ranging from laptops to supercomputers. An example of a problem involving small-scale flow features is showcased in Figure 1, which shows a simulation of a sub-mesoscale eddy in a 1km x 1km horizontal domain with an intermediate complexity biogeochemical model and a kelp growth model solved along the trajectories of drifting buoys (a list of of examples shown in this paper and links to source code are given at the end of the paper). OceanBioME.jl leverages Julia’s multiple dispatch and effective inline capabilities to fuse its computations directly into existing Oceananigans.jl kernels, thus maintaining Oceananigans.jl’s bespoke performance, memoryand cost-efficiency on GPUs in OceanBioME.jl-augmented simulations.