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The null space consists of concentration patterns on which transport produces no change. Here it is the familyEvery box has the same concentration. Ocean circulation may continue, but inflow and outflow of the chemical tracer balance in each box. With $\mathbf{b}=0$ these are exactly the steady states; physically admissible members have $\alpha \ge 0$. With nonzero $\mathbf{b}$, adding $\alpha 1$ to any particular steady state leaves its transport balance unchanged, but a null space vector alone need not balance the sources and sinks.

To identify the tracer inventory, apply conserved inventory from a left null vector. Directly summing each column givesConsequently, for the supplied ordinary differential equations,For $\mathbf{b}=0$, $M$ is a conserved quantity. The connected box model equalizes concentrations, approaching the unique member of the null space with the initial inventory:The arithmetic mean is appropriate here because the supplied matrix has zero column sums. In a general box model the conserved quantity is $w^T\mathbf{c}$, where $w$ is a positive left null space vector; for physical concentrations expressed per unit volume, these weights represent the box volumes up to a common factor. One must establish the weights from the equations, rather than infer equal volumes from a schematic drawing.

Nonnegative initial concentrations remain nonnegative under transport alone. Indeed $A+2I$ is a nonnegative matrix, sohas nonnegative entries for $t\ge 0$: it is a positive matrix semigroup. Its column sums are one by $1^{T}A=0$. To see why equalization occurs, set $d=\mathbf{c}-(M/4)1$ for $\mathbf{b}=0$; then $1^{T}d=0$ andThe right side vanishes only for constant $d$, which in the zero-sum vector subspace means $d=0$. Its strict negative bound on the unit sphere in that vector subspace gives decay to zero. Thus the matrix exponential redistributes inventory without creating negative concentrations; arbitrary prescribed sinks can still exhaust the tracer if they are allowed to act indefinitely.

A matrix exponential defines a positive matrix semigroup if $e^{tA}$ maps nonnegative vectors to nonnegative vectors for all $t\ge 0$. Here the inequality means entrywise nonnegativity, with zero entries allowed. In finite dimensions this holds exactly when the real matrix $A$ has nonnegative off-diagonal entries: if $A+\gamma I\ge 0$, expand $e^{tA}=e^{-\gamma t}{\sum }_{k\ge 0}{t}^k(A+\gamma I{)}^k/k!$; conversely, the off-diagonal entries of $e^{tA}=I+tA+O(t^2)$ force $a_{ij}\ge 0$ for $i\ne j$. Zero column sums additionally preserve $1^{T}c$ under $c^{\prime }=Ac$.