European Geosciences Union c © 2005 Author(s). This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License. Ocean Science Discussions Interactive comment on “Formulation of an ocean

• Main Authors: S. M. Griffies, A. Gnanadesikan
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: 2005
• Subjects: Southern Ocean; Webb
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.532.6957; http://www.cosis.net/copernicus/EGU/osd/2/S91/osd-2-S91_p.pdf?PHPSESSID=8156237418201406b6584f4027947e61

I’d like to thank David Webb for his comments both in this short comment and below. Since Steve Griffies is on vacation, I wanted to respond to this part of his thoughtful review. A full (and official) response to the reviewers will be forthcoming. When we speak about building a "realistic " model we are really talking about two dif-ferent things. One is getting the large-scale hydrographic fields, large-scale flow, and vertical exchange correct. The other is that the model includes processes and param-eter settings that try to represent what we know about the ocean as realistically as possible. The two are not identical. For example, my own work has shown that one can get the mean pycnocline depth and northern hemisphere overturning "correct " through vary-ing some combination of the Southern Ocean winds, tropical diffusion and lateral mix-S91 ing from mesoscale eddies (Gnanadesikan 1999). Models run with Hellermann winds (which are too weak in the Southern Ocean) and realistic levels of vertical diffusion give too weak an overturning and too shallow a pycnocline.Given an initial state with com-