Session 3. Projections of climate change impacts on marine ecosystems and their uncertainty

Co-Convenors:
Kyung-Il Chang (Seoul National University, Korea)
Corinna Schrum (University of Bergen, Norway)

Invited Speakers:
Noel Keenlyside (Geophysical Institute, University of Bergen, Norway)
Markus Meier (Sveriges Meteorologiska och Hydrologiska Institut, Sweden)
Ryan Rykaczewski (Princeton University, USA)

Within the last decades increasing scientific evidence indicates that climate change is occurring and impacting the functioning and structuring of regional marine ecosystems on various scales in various ways. Politicians and environmental and fisheries managers increasingly demand answers from scientist to assess regional impacts and future changes and risks for regional marine ecosystems and marine resources. Consequently, scientific efforts have been undertaken recently to develop tools and dynamically consistent methods to assess the regional climate change impacts to the marine ecosystems. These projections typically build on future climate change scenarios from Global Climate Models (GCMs) and involve model chains with modelling tools for various regional parts of the marine ecosystems, such as coupled physical-biological models for the lower trophic levels, IBMs (individual
based models) for fish larvae, multi-species or end-to-end models. Such projections involve a number of practical and conceptual challenges and are subject to uncertainties that arise from the baseline global climate projections and downstream modelling tools.

This session consists of papers on various aspects related to climate change projections for global and regional marine physical, biogeochemical and ecological systems, such as contributions related to: (i) projected changes, risks and potential chances, (ii) various downscaling methods (bias corrections, delta change) and their impacts on dynamic consistency of the projections and (iii) uncertainties in projections and error propagation through the model chain. We are seeking a lively and open discussion about potentials and limitations of climate change projections and downscaling to marine ecosystems.