Marine ecosystems and their services are under pressure due to changing climatic conditions and human exploitation (such as fisheries). Our ability to understand, predict and mitigate the effects of these stressors on marine ecosystems and their key species, is dependent in part upon the application of modelling tools, in particular coupled atmosphere–ocean-ecosystem models. While modern marine ecosystem models take advantage of the enormous increase in computational power over the last 40 years and the increase in our mechanistic understanding of processes occurring within marine ecosystems, they suffer from weaknesses resulting from the parameterisations employed to model unresolved processes