Anthropogenic Stressors and Future Changes of the North West European Shelf ecosystem

• Name: Anthropogenic Stressors and Future Changes of the North West European Shelf ecosystem
• EuroHPC machine used: Vega
• Topic: Natural Sciences; Earth and related Environmental Sciences

Overview of the project

Marine ecosystems are fundamental components of the Earth system, providing valuable ecosystems services. However, human activities have drastically changed the structure and functioning, as well as the health and productivity of oceans and coastal regions. In the context of the recent Administrative Arrangement BLUE2 (2023-2026) between the Directorate-General Environment (DG-ENV) of the European Commission and the Joint Research Center (JRC) the combined impacts of several policy developments on the marine ecosystem in a climate change context were assessed using ocean models. We performed multidecadal experiments (2015 – 2055) using JRC-NWES, a high resolution coupled ocean circulation – biogeochemical model configuration of the North-West European Shelves. The JRC-NWES configuration is based on the ocean circulation GETM module and the biogeochemical ERSEM module. Both modules are widely used in the marine modelling community and have been previously implemented and validated at JRC. In this project, we extended previous experiments by forcing the GETM-ERSEM model using atmosphere fields derived from climate projections in order to evaluate the impacts of different policy options on the regional ecosystem.

How did EPICURE support the project and what were the benefits of the support?

“The code performed correctly at EuroHPC Vega (Regular Project) and has been previously used in academic research. We were interested in optimizing compilation flags and MPI libraries (support level 1) without optimizing the code by itself. We were interested too to benchmark the codes routines to determine whether / where bottlenecks occur and improve performance (support level 2).

The EPICURE team permitted an improvement of performance by c.a. 10% (libraries / compilers flags optimization). In complement, they highlighted specific areas of the code acting as bottlenecks for code performance, which is of main importance for future code development.”

Additional references

Duteil, O., Macias, D., Stips, A., & Polimene, L. (2024). The major role of riverine outflows in shaping the current and future habitats of Harmful Algal Blooms: the case of the North Sea. Environmental Research Communications, 6(12), 121004.https://doi.org/10.1088/2515-7620/ad97ab