A Computational Model for Global Ocean Dynamics at all Scales

Abstract

The dynamics of the world's ocean spans a breathtaking range of scales. The circulation carries processes from thousands of kilometres down to the millimetre, and from seconds to millennia. Our understanding of global ocean dynamics is to a large extent based on the analysis of ocean model simulation data; computational models provide spatial and temporal coverage that observations can not deliver. However, the scales a computational ocean model can simulate are limited by the available computational capacity. Smaller scales, anticipated as out of reach, have been excluded a priori by shortcuts in the dynamical equations; examples are the hydrostatic and Boussinesq approximations. Hydrostatic Boussinesq models have been used since \citet{Bryan1969} up to now to simulate the planetary scale down to the mesoscale eddy resolving scale of the order of kilometers, and the hydrostatic approximation holds for most oceanic phenomena at the $\sim$1--100\,km resolutions that have been computationally affordable. The effect of removed scales on represented scales--the convective scale in the case of the hydrostatic approximation-had to be substituted by ad hoc parametrizations.