The efficient management of marine ecosystems with respect to river load reductions inevitably requires information about the source of organic and inorganic matter in the considered area. Obtaining these information in a temporally and spatially high resolution from observations is challenging and cost-intensive, but can be done with significantly less effort by biogeochemical models. Ménesguen et al. (2006) and Wijsman et al. (2004) developed a method often referred to as ‘trans-boundary nutrient transports’ (TBNT) to mark an element according to its source (e.g. phosphorus from a specific river) when it enters the system and by this tracing it through the whole biogeochemical cycle. Consequently, the results of this method can be used to quantify the distribution of these tracers in different areas of interest. In the meantime, the TBNT method has been implemented to a couple of models applied to different marine areas. However, all these applications required the implementation of TBNT into the underlying model increasing the model overhead and computation time drastically. Radtke et al. (2012) designed a ‘code generation tool’ which is capable of creating model code including TBNT to avoid the manual implementation. Nonetheless, their tool still requires exact information about the process formulations and the model architecture. Our work presents a technically new post-processing approach for TBNT which eludes the implementation into a model by using standard model output and basic information about the model’s processes and grid.

@misc{ANPTFTSETI15,
	author	 = {Fabian Große and Markus Kreus and Johannes Pätsch},
	title	 = {{A new post-processing tool for the source-related element tracing in biogeochemical models: A case study for the North Sea}},
	year	 = {2015},
	location	 = {Vienna},
	activity	 = {EGU General Assembly 2015},
	abstract	 = {The efficient management of marine ecosystems with respect to river load reductions inevitably requires information about the source of organic and inorganic matter in the considered area. Obtaining these information in a temporally and spatially high resolution from observations is challenging and cost-intensive, but can be done with significantly less effort by biogeochemical models. Ménesguen et al. (2006) and Wijsman et al. (2004) developed a method often referred to as ‘trans-boundary nutrient transports’ (TBNT) to mark an element according to its source (e.g. phosphorus from a specific river) when it enters the system and by this tracing it through the whole biogeochemical cycle. Consequently, the results of this method can be used to quantify the distribution of these tracers in different areas of interest. In the meantime, the TBNT method has been implemented to a couple of models applied to different marine areas. However, all these applications required the implementation of TBNT into the underlying model increasing the model overhead and computation time drastically. Radtke et al. (2012) designed a ‘code generation tool’ which is capable of creating model code including TBNT to avoid the manual implementation. Nonetheless, their tool still requires exact information about the process formulations and the model architecture. Our work presents a technically new post-processing approach for TBNT which eludes the implementation into a model by using standard model output and basic information about the model’s processes and grid.},
}