AIBECS.jl: A tool for exploring global marine biogeochemical cycles.

Abstract

The ocean transports, mixes, and transforms chemical constituents on a multitude of time and length scales. Observations and models are both essential for making sense of this complex system. However, the days of just publishing data without any quantitative modelling are over, increasing pressure on sea-going oceanographers that are expected to be proficient in the use of biogeochemical models. And while the simplest of these models consist of only a few boxes (e.g., the two-box model of Archer et al., 2000), with solutions that are easily obtained by hand or on a simple desktop computer, the most advanced models have highresolution three-dimensional meshes that require high-performance computing (HPC) clusters and a considerable amount of computational-science expertise (e.g., the MITgcm, Campin et al., 2021). A high barrier to entry for modelling in oceanography hinders advances in the field. AIBECS.jl (Pasquier, 2021) is a JuliaOcean-affiliated package written in Julia (Bezanson et al., 2017), which aims to lower this barrier by providing an easy-to-use, open-source, and modular framework for simulating global marine tracers in steady-state and biogeochemical parameter fitting.