The Impact of Surface Flux Parameterizations on the Modeling of the North Atlantic Ocean

• Main Authors: Afonso M. Paiva, Eric P. Chassignet
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: 2000
• Subjects: North Atlantic
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.38.5091

The response of an ocean general circulation model to several distinct parameterizations of the surface heat and fresh water fluxes, which differ primarily by their representation of the oceanatmosphere feedbacks, is investigated in a realistic configuration for the North Atlantic Ocean. First, the impact of explicitly introducing oceanic information (climatological sea surface temperature) into the computation of the heat flux through a Haney-type restoring boundary condition, as opposed to the case in which the flux is based on atmosphere-only climatologies and is computed with the full bulk formulation, is considered. The strong similarity between these two approaches is demonstrated, and the sources of possible differences are discussed. When restoring boundary conditions are applied to the surface salinity, however, an unphysical feedback mechanism is being introduced. The model's response to this restoring is contrasted to the response to a flux boundary condition that prescribes.