MPAS-Ocean Model User's Guide

Abstract

The Model for Prediction Across Scales-Ocean (MPAS-Ocean) is an unstructured-mesh ocean model capable of using enhanced horizontal resolution in selected regions of the ocean domain. This allows researchers to perform high-resolution regional simulations at a lower computational cost, while providing realistic currents and water-mass properties from the low-resolution regions. Model domains may be spherical with bottom topography to simulate the earth’s oceans, or on Cartesian domains for idealized experiments. The global meshes, created using Spherical Centroidal Voronoi Tesselations (Ringler et al., 2008, 2011) consist of gridcells that vary smoothly from low to high resolution regions. Numerical algorithms specifically designed for these grids guarantee that mass, tracers, potential vorticity (in isopycnal mode) and energy are conserved (Thuburn et al., 2009; Ringler et al., 2010). MPAS-Ocean high-resolution and variable-resolution global simulations, as well as descriptions of mesh generation, model capabilities, and algorithms, are presented in Ringler et al. (2013).