Baroclinic pressure gradient difference schemes of subtracting the local averaged density stratification in sigma coordinates models

Much has been written of the error in computing the baroclinic pressure gradient (BPG) with sigma coordinates in ocean or atmos- pheric numerical models. The usual way to reduce the error is to subtract area-averaged density stratification of the whole computa- tion region. But if there is great difference between the area-averaged and the local averaged density stratification, the error will be obvious. An example is given to show that the error from this method may be larger than that from no correction sometimes. The definition of local area is put forward. Then, four improved BPG difference schemes of subtracting the local averaged density strat- ification are designed to reduce the error. Two of them are for diagnostic calculation (density field is fixed), and the others are for prognostic calculation (density field is not fixed). The results show that the errors from these schemes all significantly decrease.