To track the fate of nutrients which enter a marine ecosystem from a specific source, Eulerian and Langrangian techniques can be used. Among the Eulerian approaches, the tagging method is the most accurate one. In this talk, we apply the method to answer three research questions in the Baltic Sea:
- How do biological processes modify the spreading of nutrients from different riverine sources?
- How strong is the nitrogen exchange between North Sea and Baltic Sea?
- How important is the oxygen content of the water imported during Major Baltic Inflows?
The advantages of the technique are demonstrated. Also, we discuss a novel extension to it: the introduction of an “age attribution” method which allows to assess the time scales of processes represented in the ecosystem model.
Dr Hagen Radtke is a Post-doc from the IOW Institute (Germany), and will be joining Dr. Ivan Haigh’s team at the National Oceanography Centre.