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The ongoing work of combining three existing software programs into a nested grid oceanography model is detailed. The HYPER domain decomposition program, the SPEM ocean modeling program, and a quasi-geostrophic model written in England are being combined into a general ocean modeling facility. This facility will be used to test the viability and the capability of two-way nested grids in the North Atlantic.
Omega version 0, the first step toward a new ocean model, has been developed to take full advantage of next-generation supercomputers, including those powered by GPUs. Omega is rebuilt from the ground up, redesigning computational aspects of ocean models to run faster and more efficiently across diverse high-performance computing systems.
Discretisation of the horizontal pressure gradient force in layered ocean models is a challenging task, with non-trivial interactions between the thermodynamics of the fluid and the geometry of the layers often leading to numerical difficulties. We present two new finite-volume schemes for the pressure gradient operator designed to address these issues. In each case, the horizontal acceleration is computed as an integration of the contact pressure force that acts along the perimeter of an associated momentum control-volume. A pair of new schemes are developed by exploring different control-volume geometries. Non-linearities in the underlying equation-of-state definitions and thermodynamic profiles are treated using a high-order accurate numerical integration framework, designed to preserve hydrostatic balance in a non-linear manner. Numerical experiments show that the new methods achieve high levels of consistency, maintaining hydrostatic and thermobaric equilibrium in the presence of strongly-sloping layer geometries, non-linear equations-of-state and non-uniform vertical stratification profiles. These results suggest that the new pressure gradient formulations may be appropriate for general circulation models that employ hybrid vertical coordinates andor terrain-following representations.
The distribution and variation of oxygen isotopes in seawater are calculated using the Goddard Institute for Space Studies global ocean model. Simple ecological models are used to estimate the planktonic foraminiferal abundance as a function of depth, column temperature, season, light intensity, and density stratification. These models are combined to forward model isotopic signals recorded in calcareous ocean sediment. The sensitivity of the results to the changes in foraminiferal ecology, secondary calcification, and dissolution are also examined. Simulated present-day isotopic values for ecology relevant for multiple species compare well with core-top data. Hindcasts of sea surface temperature and salinity are made from time series of the modeled carbonate isotope values as the model climate changes. Paleoclimatic inferences from these carbonate isotope records are strongly affected by erroneous assumptions concerning the covariations of temperature, salinity, and delta (sup 18)O(sub w). Habitat-imposed biases are less important, although errors due to temperature-dependent abundances can be significant.
The Geosat altimetric sea level observations for the period from January to December 1987 were continuously assimilated into a realistic wind-driven numerical synoptic ocean model of the California Current in order to evaluate the effectiveness of using a realistic synoptic ocean model for interpolating (dynamically) real altimetric sea level observations onto a regular grid. The accuracy of dynamical interpolation was tested by comparing the gridded sea level residuals to ones estimated from in situ observations (by expendable bathythermographs) collected in the California Current region during the same period. The comparison yielded nearly exact agreement at low frequency (i.e., semiannual cycle), but less agreement on month-to-month time scales of variability, possibly due to the unfiltered nature of the in situ estimates.
The US Department of Energy (DOE) conducts climate simulations on some of the world’s largest supercomputers. These exascale machines use heterogeneous architectures with both CPUs and GPUs, and scientific codes must adapt to make full use of this computing power. Los Alamos National Lab is developing Omega: The Ocean Model for E3SM Global Applications, which is specifically designed for modern exascale computers. It uses external libraries that have been optimized for a variety of architectures to run on different supercomputers. Omega is an unstructured-mesh ocean model based on TRiSK numerical methods. It will be the new ocean component of the DOE’s Energy Exascale Earth System Model (E3SM). The algorithms in Omega follow those of the current ocean component, MPAS-Ocean, but it will be written in C++ rather than Fortran to take advantage of the Kokkos performance portability library. Omega spatial operators are written as Kokkos kernels to run efficiently on both CPUs and GPUs. Work on Omega began in 2023 with a new C++ framework for unstructured mesh partitioning, halo exchanges, parallel IO, and Kokkos interfaces. The current version, Omega-0, is being developed to solve the shallow water equations and at present includes all of the tendency terms but not time stepping. Here we share the results of Omega-0 verification and performance testing. Verification includes unit tests implemented with CTest as well as convergence tests in Polaris, an in-house python package with a large suite of test problems. Performance tests compare simulations conducted on CPUs versus GPUs and across different architectures: tests are run on Frontier, which has AMD “Optimized 3rd Gen EPYC” CPUs and AMD MI250X GPUs, as well as Perlmutter, which is composed of AMD EPYC 7763 CPUs and NVIDIA A100 GPUs.
Different distributions of variables over the horizontal array of grid points in an ocean circulation model are investigated, using the shallow water equations as a guide in the choice of finite-difference schemes for use in ocean modeling. It is shown that the scheme with diffusive dissipation, in which the horizontal velocity is carried at the center and the height field is carried at each corner of a rectangular grid, successively suppresses numerical noise in a coarse (greater than 100 km) grid ocean model. For resolutions smaller than 50 km, it is shown that the scheme in which zonal velocity is carried at points to the east and west of the point of a rectangular grid where the height is carried, with meridional velocity carried to the north and south of the height point, can be free of noise for the gravest mode.
An analytical coupled ice-ocean model is considered which is forced by a specified wind stress acting on the open ocean as well as the ice. The analysis supports the conjecture that the upwelling dynamics at ice edges can be understood by means of a simple analytical model. In similarity with coastal problems it is shown that the ice edge upwelling is determined by the net mass flux at the boundaries of the considered region. The model is used to study the sensitivity of the upwelling dynamics in the marginal ice zone to variation in the controlling parameters. These parameters consist of combinations of the drag coefficients used in the parameterization of the stresses on the three interfaces atmosphere-ice, atmosphere-ocean, and ice-ocean. The response is shown to be sensitive to variations in these parameters in that one set of parameters may give upwelling while a slightly different set of parameters may give downwelling.
Climate modeling is one of the grand challenges of computational science, and ocean modeling plays an important role in both understanding the current climatic conditions and predicting future climate change.
Sea level has been rising for the past century, and inhabitants of the Earth's coastal regions will want to understand and predict future sea level changes. In this study we present results from new simulations of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) global atmosphere-ocean model from 1950 to 2099. Model results are compared with observed sea level changes during the past 40 years at 17 coastal stations around the world. Using observed levels of greenhouse gases between 1950 and 1990 and a compounded 0.5% annual increase in Co2 after 1990, model projections show that global sea level measured from 1950 will rise by 61 mm in the year 2000, by 212 mm in 2050, and by 408 mm in 2089. By 2089, two thirds of the global sea level rise will be due to thermal expansion and one third will be due to ocean mass changes. The spatial distribution of sea level rise is different than that projected by rigid lid ocean models.
A three-dimensional variational data assimilation scheme for the Regional Ocean Modeling System (ROMS), named ROMS3DVAR, has been described in the work of Li et al. (2008). In this paper, ROMS3DVAR is applied to the central California coastal region, an area characterized by inhomogeneity and anisotropy, as well as by dynamically unbalanced flows. A method for estimating the model error variances from limited observations is presented, and the construction of the inhomogeneous and anisotropic error correlations based on the Kronecker product is demonstrated. A set of single observation experiments illustrates the inhomogeneous and anisotropic error correlations and weak dynamic constraints used. Results are presented from the assimilation of data gathered during the Autonomous Ocean Sampling Network (AOSN) experiment during August 2003. The results show that ROMS3DVAR is capable of reproducing complex flows associated with upwelling and relaxation, as well as the rapid transitions between them. Some difficulties encountered during the experiment are also discussed.
With the growing power and shrinking cost of personal computers. the availability of fast ethernet interconnections, and public domain software packages, it is now possible to combine them to build desktop parallel computers (named Beowulf or PC clusters) at a fraction of what it would cost to buy systems of comparable power front supercomputer companies. This led as to build and assemble our own sys tem. specifically for climate ocean modeling. In this article, we present our experience with such a system, discuss its network performance, and provide some performance comparison data with both HP SPP2000 and Cray T3E for an ocean Model used in present-day oceanographic research.
A dynamical coupled ice-ocean numerical model for the marginal ice zone (MIZ) is suggested and used to study upwelling dynamics in the MIZ. The nonlinear sea ice model has a variable ice concentration and includes internal ice stress. The model is forced by stresses on the air/ocean and air/ice surfaces. The main coupling between the ice and the ocean is in the form of an interfacial stress on the ice/ocean interface. The ocean model is a linear reduced gravity model. The wind stress exerted by the atmosphere on the ocean is proportional to the fraction of open water, while the interfacial stress ice/ocean is proportional to the concentration of ice. A new mechanism for ice edge upwelling is suggested based on a geostrophic equilibrium solution for the sea ice medium. The upwelling reported in previous models invoking a stationary ice cover is shown to be replaced by a weak downwelling due to the ice motion. Most of the upwelling dynamics can be understood by analysis of the divergence of the across ice edge upper ocean transport. On the basis of numerical model, an analytical model is suggested that reproduces most of the upwelling dynamics of the more complex numerical model.
A coupled ice-ocean numerical model for the marginal ice zone is considered. The model consists of a nonlinear sea ice model and a two-layer (reduced gravity) ocean model. The dependence of the upwelling response on wind stress direction is discussed. The results confirm earlier analytical work. It is shown that there exist directions for which there is no upwelling, while other directions give maximum upwelling in terms of the volume of uplifted water. The ice and ocean is coupled directly through the stress at the ice-ocean interface. An interesting consequence of the coupling is found in cases when the ice edge is almost stationary. In these cases the ice tends to break up a few tenths of kilometers inside of the ice edge.
Results are presented of a series of numerical experiments in which an upper ocean model is driven by surface heat fluxes and stress fields derived from the FGGE SOP-1 GLAS analysis/forecast system (Halem, et al., 1982). The model results show that most changes in the mixed layer height and horizontal velocity occurs in the first days. On the other hand, changes in the temperature field take a longer time to develop. In the most realistic case (real initial conditions, instantaneous forcing fields from the atmospheric analysis), the resulting changes in temperature were larger than observed and the correlation between observed and predicted changes was poor. The deficiency in the forecast of SST changes may be due to several factors: lack of sufficient ocean resolution, improper initialization, lack of feedback between the ocean and the atmosphere and the absence of transports by the strong boundary currents, and perhaps unrealistic surface fluxes of heat and momentum. Unless these problems are alleviated it is not reasonable to perform coupled atmospheric ocean forecasts.
How does climate sensitivity vary with the magnitude of climate forcing? This question was investigated with the use of a modified coupled atmosphere-ocean model, whose stability was improved so that the model would accommodate large radiative forcings yet be fast enough to reach rapid equilibrium. Experiments were performed in which atmospheric CO2 was multiplied by powers of 2, from 1/64 to 256 times the 1950 value. From 8 to 32 times, the 1950 CO2, climate sensitivity for doubling CO2 reaches 8 C due to increases in water vapor absorption and cloud top height and to reductions in low level cloud cover. As CO2 amount increases further, sensitivity drops as cloud cover and planetary albedo stabilize. No water vapor-induced runaway greenhouse caused by increased CO2 was found for the range of CO2 examined. With CO2 at or below 1/8 of the 1950 value, runaway sea ice does occur as the planet cascades to a snowball Earth climate with fully ice covered oceans and global mean surface temperatures near 30 C.
The behavior and possible past evolution of fully coupled atmosphere and ocean model of Titan are investigated. It is found that Titan's surface temperature was about 20 K cooler at 4 Gyr ago and will be about 5 K warmer 0.5 Gyr in the future. The change in solar luminosity and the conversion of oceanic CH4 to C2H6 drive the evolution of the ocean and atmosphere over time. Titan appears to have experienced a frozen epoch about 3 Gyr ago independent of whether an ocean is present or not. This finding may have important implications for understanding the inventory of Titan's volatile compounds.
Oceanic convective plumes modeled with a thermobaric large-eddy simulation and driven by conditions similar to those of the Greenland Sea are compared to observations from ERS-1 Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) data from the Greenland Sea for the winter of 1992. In both form and size the two representations are seen to compare favorably. The plume-filled area of the SAR image occupies a region about 20 km by 90 km at the ice edge of the open water in 'Nordbukta', the large seasonal ice retreat, in the 'Odden' ice protuberance in the southern Greenland gyre. In the SAR data the plumes appear to be ice covered while the convective-return areas are open.