Surface Wave Effects in the NEMO Ocean Model: Forced and Coupled Experiments

By O. Breivik, Kristian Mogensen, Jean-Raymond Bidlot, M. Balmaseda, Peter A. E. M. Janssen. 2015

154 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The NEMO general circulation ocean model is extended to incorporate three physical processes related to ocean surface waves, namely the surface stress (modified by growth and dissipation of the oceanic wave field), the turbulent kinetic energy flux from breaking waves, and the Stokes-Coriolis force. Experiments are done with NEMO in ocean-only (forced) mode and coupled to the ECMWF atmospheric and wave models. Ocean-only integrations are forced with fields from the ERA-Interim reanalysis. All three effects are noticeable in the extra-tropics, but the sea-state dependent turbulent kinetic energy flux yields by far the largest difference. This is partly because the control run has too vigorous deep mixing due to an empirical mixing term in NEMO. We investigate the relation between this ad hoc mixing and Langmuir turbulence and find that it is much more effective than the Langmuir parameterization used in NEMO. The biases in sea surface temperature as well as subsurface temperature are reduced, and the total ocean heat content exhibits a trend closer to that observed in a recent ocean reanalysis (ORAS4) when wave effects are included. Seasonal integrations of the coupled atmosphere-wave-ocean model consisting of NEMO, the wave model ECWAM and the atmospheric model of ECMWF similarly show that the sea surface temperature biases are greatly reduced when the mixing is controlled by the sea state and properly weighted by the thickness of the uppermost level of the ocean model. These wave-related physical processes were recently implemented in the operational coupled ensemble forecast system of ECMWF.

Subfields: Atmospheric Science, Oceanography

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/2d750f9e7a452a54122a4d09a206fed2e449f903

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Citations in the corpus

Structure of the airflow above surface waves (2016, background): “These fluxes may in turn impact large-scale weather patterns, sea state, and climate and are, as such, key components of recent oceanic and atmospheric models (e.g., Breivik et al. 2015).”
Climate model configurations of the ECMWF Integrated Forecasting System (ECMWF-IFS cycle 43r1) for HighResMIP (2018, background): “The ocean-wave model interacts with the atmosphere and oceans through exchange of the Charnock parameter that determines the sea surface roughness (Janssen, 2004) and by introducing a sea-state-dependent modification of the turbulent kinetic energy flux used for ocean mixing (Janssen et al., 2013; B”
The physical oceanography of the transport of floating marine debris (2020, background): “The anti-Stokes response explains how Stokes advection by itself can cause a larger impact than Stokes advection plus other Stokes forces (Breivik et al 2015).”