Journal
OCEAN MODELLING
Volume 83, Issue -, Pages 43-62Publisher
ELSEVIER SCI LTD
DOI: 10.1016/j.ocemod.2014.08.006
Keywords
LES; OGCM; Mixing; Stirring; Submesoscale
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Funding
- Office of Naval Research and National Science Foundation [N00014-09-1-0267, OCE-0961369]
- BP/The Gulf of Mexico Research Initiative
- City University of New York High Performance Computing Center under NSF [CNS-0855217, CNS-0958379]
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Our primary objective is to quantify the uncertainty in the solution space associated with mixing and stirring in ocean general circulation models (OGCMs) due to common modeling choices, namely the spatial resolution, tracer advection schemes, Reynolds number and turbulence closures. In many cases the assessment of errors is limited by the observational data set, therefore, large eddy simulations from a spectral element Boussinesq solver are taken as ground truth. First, the lock-exchange problem is used to quantify the temporal evolution of mixing from shear-driven stratified overturns. It is found that mixing in an OGCM is more sensitive to the choice of grid resolution than any other parameters tested here. The results do not monotonically converge towards the ground truth as the resolution is refined. Second, stirring of a passive tracer by submesoscale eddies generated by surface density fronts is considered. We find that using a second-order turbulence closure leads to an accurate representation of the restratification in the mixed layer. (C) 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
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