The Idea and Concept of Metos3D: A Marine Ecosystem Toolkit for Optimization and Simulation in 3D

Abstract

The simulation and parameter optimization of coupled ocean circulation and ecosystem models in three space dimensions is one of the most challenging tasks in numerical climate research. Here we present a scientific toolkit that aims at supporting researchers by defining clear coupling interfaces, providing state-of-the-art numerical methods for simulation, parallelization and optimization while using only freely available and (to a great extend) platform-independent software. Besides defining a user-friendly coupling interface (API) for marine ecosystem or biogeochemical models, we heavily rely on the Portable, Extensible Toolkit for Scientific computation (PETSc) developed at Argonne Nat. Lab. for a wide variety of parallel linear and non-linear solvers and optimizers. We specifically focus on the usage of matrix-free Newton-Krylov methods for the fast computation of steady periodic solutions, and make use of the Transport Matrix Method (TMM) introduced by Khatiwala et al.