GENIE-M: a new and improved GENIE-1 developed in Minnesota

Abstract

Here we describe GENIE-M, a new and improved version of the Grid ENabled Integrated Earth system model (GENIE), which is a 3-D earth system model of intermediate complexity. Main development goals of GENIE-M were to: (1) bring oceanic uptake of anthropogenic transient tracers within data constraints; (2) increase vertical resonlution in the upper ocean to better represent near-surface biogeochemical processes; (3) callibrate the deep ocean ventilation with observed abundance of radiocarbon. We achieved all these goals through a transparent process of calibration that mostly consisted of objective model optimization. An important new feature in GENIE-M that dramatically improved the uptake of CFC-11 and anthropogenic carbon is the depth dependent vertical diffusivity in the ocean, which is spatially uniform in GENIE-1. In GENIE-M, biological production occurs in the top two layers above the compensation depth of 100m and is modified, for example, by diagnosed mixed layer depth. In contrast, production in GENIE-1 occurs in a single layer with thickness of 175m. These improvements make GENIE-M a well-callibrated model of intermediate complexity suitable for investigations of the global marine carbon cycle requiring long integration time.

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