🧪 Modeling the Salish Sea with Oceananigans: A Collaboration with Ebb Carbon

Mar 1

Submarine Scientific is developing a high-resolution ocean model configuration of the Salish Sea region and Port Angeles Harbor alongside Ebb Carbon’s electrochemical ocean alkalinity enhancement (OAE) field trial. This project showcases a novel application of GPU-accelerated Julia tools—Oceananigans and OceanBioME—for realistic coastal biogeochemical simulations.

🌊 Project Goals
The modeling effort includes two connected configurations:

Nearfield (Port Angeles Harbor): Simulates the 3D dynamics of an alkaline plume released at a point source, validated against in situ data from Ebb’s monitoring pier.
Regional (Salish Sea): Uses Oceananigans+OceanBioME to simulate seasonal variability in alkalinity transport and air-sea CO₂ fluxes, benchmarked against LiveOcean, a validated, established biogeochemical ocean model of the region with a strong track record.

🚀 Why It Matters
Scaling ocean-based CDR requires models that are fast, transparent, and tailored to specific deployment sites. Traditional models can be slow to set up and hard to adapt. Our work aims to:

Validate use of Oceananigans + OceanBioME in a realistic regional configuration
Accelerate model configuration and validation at new sites
Quantify systemic uncertainty in modeled CDR through regional model intercomparison
Enable transparent and reproducible results for registries and stakeholders

🔍 Technical Highlights

GPU-enabled, non-hydrostatic Oceananigans nearfield model
Hydrostatic regional model with biogeochemistry from OceanBioME
Shared boundary and forcing data with LiveOcean for intercomparison
Early plume visualizations and well-documented workflows for reproducibility

📚 Looking Ahead
We’re working closely with Ebb Carbon to produce model results and are preparing an open-source notebook for Oceananigans+OceanBioME regional modeling.

This collaboration reflects Submarine Scientific’s commitment to enabling credible, site-specific modeling tools that help advance the scalability of marine CDR.

Jacki Long

🧪 Modeling the Salish Sea with Oceananigans: A Collaboration with Ebb Carbon

🌊 Project Goals The modeling effort includes two connected configurations:

🚀 Why It Matters Scaling ocean-based CDR requires models that are fast, transparent, and tailored to specific deployment sites. Traditional models can be slow to set up and hard to adapt. Our work aims to:

🔍 Technical Highlights

📚 Looking Ahead We’re working closely with Ebb Carbon to produce model results and are preparing an open-source notebook for Oceananigans+OceanBioME regional modeling.

🐳 Introducing marine CDR to the San Francisco tech community

🎙️ Podcast Feature: Submarine’s Jacki Long Discusses mCDR Data Standardization on Plan Sea

🌊 Project Goals
The modeling effort includes two connected configurations:

🚀 Why It Matters
Scaling ocean-based CDR requires models that are fast, transparent, and tailored to specific deployment sites. Traditional models can be slow to set up and hard to adapt. Our work aims to:

📚 Looking Ahead
We’re working closely with Ebb Carbon to produce model results and are preparing an open-source notebook for Oceananigans+OceanBioME regional modeling.