A positive and multi-element conserving time stepping scheme for biogeochemical processes in marine ecosystem models

In this paper, an unconditionally positive and multi-element conserving time stepping scheme for systems of non-linearly coupled ODE’s is presented. These systems of ODE’s are used to describe biogeochemical transformation processes in marine ecosystem models. The numerical scheme is a positive-definite modification of the Runge–Kutta method, it can have arbitrarily high order of accuracy and does not require time step adaption. If the scheme is combined with a modified Patankar–Runge–Kutta method from Burchard et al. (2003), it also gets the ability to solve a certain class of stiff numerical problems, but the accuracy is restricted to second-order then. The performance of the new scheme on two test case problems is shown.