Abstract. The regulation of anthropogenic carbon dioxide (CO2) is an urgent issue – continuously increasing atmospheric CO2 from burning
fossil fuels is leading to significant warming and acidification of the
surface ocean. Timely and effective measures to curb CO2 increases are
thus needed in order to mitigate the potential degradation of natural
ecosystems, food security, and livelihood caused by anthropogenic release of
CO2. Enhanced rock weathering (ERW) on croplands and hinterlands may be
one of the most economically and ecologically effective ways to sequester
CO2 from the atmosphere, given that these soil environments generally
favor mineral dissolution and because amending soils with crushed rock can
result in a number of co-benefits to plant growth and crop yield. However, robust quantitative evaluation of CO2 capture by ERW in terrestrial soil systems that can lead to coherent policy implementation will require an ensemble of traceable mechanistic models that are optimized for simulating ERW in managed systems. Here, we present a new 1D reactive transport model – SCEPTER. The model is designed to (1) mechanistically simulate natural weathering, including dissolution/precipitation of minerals along with
uplift/erosion of solid phases, advection plus diffusion of aqueous phases
and diffusion of gas phases, (2) allow targeted addition of solid phases at the soil–atmosphere interface, including multiple forms of organic matter
(OM) and crushed mineral/rock feedstocks, (3) implement a range of soil mixing regimes as catalyzed by soil surface fauna (e.g., bioturbation) or
humans (e.g., various forms of tilling), and (4) enable calculation of solid mineral surface area based on controlled initial particle size distributions
coupled to a shrinking core framework. Here we describe the model structure
and intrinsic thermodynamic/kinetic data, provide a series of idealized
simulations to demonstrate the basic behavior of the code, and evaluate the
computational and mechanistic performance of the model against observational
data. We also provide selected example applications to highlight model
features particularly useful for future prediction of CO2 sequestration
by ERW in soil systems.
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