Addressing the storage needs of researchers in the northeast
Members of the MIT-led Simons Collaboration on Computational Biogeochemical Modeling of Marine Ecosystems (CBIOMES) use NESE to store model output used in developing theories to explain and predict how phytoplankton are distributed in the ocean.
Microbial communities in the sea mediate the global cycles of elements including carbon, sulfur, and nitrogen. Photosynthetic microbes in the surface ocean fix these elements into organic molecules, fueling food webs that sustain most other life in the ocean. Organic matter is transported into the deeper, dark ocean, where it is consumed and respired by microbes, maintaining a reservoir of carbon substantially larger than the atmospheric inventory of CO2. The organisms that sustain these global-scale cycles are functionally and genetically diverse, non-uniformly distributed, and sparsely sampled in space and time. Modeling them generates an ocean of data that needs a system like NESE to hold it all.
