Model experiments used to determine the mechanistic links between the North Pacific Gyre Oscillation and the environmental parameters responsible for changes in plankton in the Central Strait of Georgia, British Columbia, Canada

We used a three-dimensional coupled biophysical model, SalishSeaCast, to perform a series of ten model experiments to determine the mechanistic links between the North Pacific Gyre Oscillation and the environmental parameters responsible for changes to phytoplankton in the Central Strait of Georgia, British Columbia, Canada. First, we selected 2008 as a “typical” cold year (CY) and 2019 as a “typical” warm year (WY) from the four strongest NPGO positive and negative years, respectively, throughout our time series of 2007-2020. We then independently tested each of the environmental parameters of interest by applying individual parameters from a given experimental CY to the original typical WY and vice versa. This repository contains the raw output for each of the model experiments, which were run for the entire year beginning January 1. Source code for analyses related to these experiments can be found at doi: https://zenodo.org/doi/10.5281/zenodo.10652235