Numerical simulation by a stretched-coordinate Ocean General Circulation Model: A preliminary results

Summary ?A three-dimensional Ocean General Circulation Model has been developed in stretched coordinate from scratch. The same model has been used to perform some numerical experiments to simulate the basic circulation pattern and the model variability to atmospheric forcing. For numerical simulations 72 × 25 grid points in the horizontal directions and nine (10, 30, 75, 250, 500, 1000, 1500, 2000 and 3000 m) vertical levels are considered. The lateral boundaries are set at 60° N and 60° S. The basic focus of the paper is on the demonstration of the performance of the model and its assessment by employing appropriate forcing from the outputs of an atmospheric general circulation model. Hence, the model was forced with the forcing (wind and thermodynamic) derived from the ECMWF runs from the AMIP archives. The preliminary results show the realistic simulation of basic pattern of different fields. The model simulations show that the model is able to reproduce some of the general features of the ocean, such as surface currents, surface temperature and salinity, mass transport and meridional heat transport. It is also to be noted that the model is capable to capture the El-Ni?o and La-Ni?a type events. Received April 3, 2002; revised June 6, 2002; accepted July 24, 2002 Published online: February 20, 2003