Effects of adjusting vertical resolution on the eastern equatorial Pacific cold tongue

The vertical resolution of LICOM1.0 (LASG/IAP Climate System Ocean Model, version 1.0) is adjusted by increasing the level amount within the upper 150 m while keeping the total of levels. It is found that the eastern equatorial Pacific cold tongue is sensitive to the adjustment. Compared with the simulation of the original level scheme, the adjusting yields a more realistic structure of cold tongue extending from the coast of Peru to the equator, as well as a temperature minimum at Costa Rica coast, north of the cold tongue. In the original scheme experiment, the sharp heating by net surface heat flux at the beginning of spin-up leads to a great warm- ing in the eastern equatorial Pacific Ocean. The weak vertical advection due to a too thick mixed layer in the coarse vertical structure also accounts for the warm bias. The fact that most significant improvements of the upper 50 m temperature appear at the region of the thinnest mixed layer indicates the necessity of fine vertical resolution for the eastern equatorial Pacific Ocean. However, the westward extension of equatorial cold tongue, a defect in the original scheme, gets even more serious in the adjusting scheme due to the intensi- fied vertical velocity and hence vertical advection in the central-eastern equatorial Pacific Ocean.