An Idealised Barotropic Ocean Gyre Model Code, Based on MITgcm

• Main Authors: Yixi Zheng, David P. Stevens, Karen J. Heywood, Benjamin G. M. Webber, Bastien Y. Queste
• Format: Other/Unknown Material
• Language: unknown
• Published: Zenodo 2022
• Subjects: MITgcm; ocean gyre model; Amundsen Sea; Curl; Island Bay; Pine Island Bay; Ice Shelves; Sea ice
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.6757626

This dataset is supplementary to The Cryosphere paper "Reversal of ocean gyres near ice shelves in the Amundsen Sea caused by the interaction of sea ice and wind". A full model description and the application can be found in the paper. Here is the modified version of the model set-upwritten in the paper in the chapter 3. This model is based on theMIT general circulation model (MITgcm; MITgcm’s user manual 4.1;Marshall et al., 1997) with an idealised barotropic set-up. The model has an ocean domain with a size of 60 × 60 km and a horizontal grid spacing of 1 km. It has one 1-km-thick vertical layer with a free surface. All simulations are run for six model months, which allows all of them to spin up to be sufficiently close to a steady state. The spin-up time of the simulations varies from 51 days to 91 days, assessed as the time at which the daily change of the total kinetic energy of the ocean is less than 0.1% of the total kinetic energy of the ocean at the final model day of the 6 model months. The wind field is the only external forcing applied to the model ocean. We generate a simplified wind forcing field based on the key features of the climatological wind in the south-eastern Amundsen Sea to include the ice conditions for both Pine Island Bay and around the Thwaites Ice Tongue. The ERA5 climatological 10-m wind (Hersbachet al., 2018) above the PIB and Thwaites gyres blows from the ice shelves to the ocean, with a speed decreasing from the southeast to the northwest. The maximum wind speed (10 m s -1 ) occurs in the southwestern corner of the model domain. The meridional gradient of wind speed (−1.667 × 10 -6 s -1 ) is one-fifth of the zonal gradient of wind speed (−8.333 × 10 -6 s -1 ). We vary the strength and sign of the wind stress curl to generate four wind forcing fields: strong or weak, cyclonic or anticyclonic wind stress curl. The average wind speed over the whole oceanmodel domain is kept the same for all four wind fields. Inside the main folder, there are five subfolders, - exp_ada_Flat: for ...