Project: Modular System for Shelves and Coasts - The overarching goal of the project Modular System for Shelves and Coasts (MOSSCO, www.mossco.de) was to bring together the distributed capacities in coastal ocean modelling in Germany and to build a common infrastructure for the national and international coastal research community. MOSSCO built a framework for a modular data and model system, an infrastructure, which has been identified as research demand by the Forschungsagenda Nord- und Ostsee within the framework of the Research Agenda for Sustainable Development (FONA, www.fona.de). MOSSCO integrates physical, biological, chemical and geological modules in an exchangeable way. This modular infrastructure supports synoptic studies of coastal and shelf seas including their interfaces to adjacent Earth-system components, such as sediment, atmosphere, rivers and the open ocean. Benefits of this approach are most apparent for the description of cohesive sediments where strong interactions between the benthic and pelagic compartment and between hydrodynamic, biogeochemical (BGC), ecological and sedimentary processes are largely unresolved within state-of-the-art models. Summary: Regional coupled ecosystem simulation of the Southern North Sea with the fully coupled Modular System for Shelves and Coasts (MOSSCO), an application layer of the Earth System Modeling Framework (ESMF). Here, we couple (1) the General Estuarine Transport Model (GETM) hydrodynamics and local waves with (2) the Model for Adaptive ECoSystems (MAECS) in the pelagic through the Framework for Aquatic Biogeochemical Models (FABM), and (3) the Ocean Margin Experiment Diagenesis (OMExDia) with added phosphorus cycle in the benthic through FABM.
