The Mixed Layer Depth in the Ocean Model Intercomparison Project (OMIP): Impact of Resolving Mesoscale Eddies
| Autor: | Anne Marie Treguier, Clement de Boyer Montégut, Alexandra Bozec, Eric P. Chassignet, Baylor Fox-Kemper, Andy McC. Hogg, Doroteacino Iovino, Andrew E. Kiss, Julien Le Sommer, Yiwen Li, Pengfei Lin, Camille Lique, Hailong Liu, Guillaume Serazin, Dmitry Sidorenko, Qiang Wang, Xiaobio Xu, Steve Yeager |
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| Rok vydání: | 2023 |
| Zdroj: | eISSN EGUsphere (Copernicus GmbH) In Press |
| DOI: | 10.5194/egusphere-2023-310 |
| Popis: | The ocean mixed layer is the interface between the ocean interior and the atmosphere or sea ice and plays a key role in climate variability. It is thus critical that numerical models used in climate studies are capable of a good representation of the mixed layer, especially its depth. Here we evaluate the mixed-layer depth (MLD) in six pairs of non-eddying (1∘ grid spacing) and eddy-rich (up to 1/16∘) models from the Ocean Model Intercomparison Project (OMIP), forced by a common atmospheric state. For model evaluation, we use an updated MLD dataset computed from observations using the OMIP protocol (a constant density threshold). In winter, low-resolution models exhibit large biases in the deep-water formation regions. These biases are reduced in eddy-rich models but not uniformly across models and regions. The improvement is most noticeable in the mode-water formation regions of the Northern Hemisphere. Results in the Southern Ocean are more contrasted, with biases of either sign remaining at high resolution. In eddy-rich models, mesoscale eddies control the spatial variability in MLD in winter. Contrary to a hypothesis that the deepening of the mixed layer in anticyclones would make the MLD larger globally, eddy-rich models tend to have a shallower mixed layer at most latitudes than coarser models do. In addition, our study highlights the sensitivity of the MLD computation to the choice of a reference level and the spatio-temporal sampling, which motivates new recommendations for MLD computation in future model intercomparison projects. |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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