Meddies in the Mercator North Atlantic and Mediterranean Sea eddy‐resolving model

Abstract

[1] The new generation of high-resolution ocean models offers a new way to investigate the characteristics and the evolution of the ocean mesoscale. An analysis of the simulated Mediterranean eddies, the so-called ''meddies,'' is presented. The model used in this study is the Mercator North Atlantic [9°N, 70°N] and Mediterranean Sea Prototype (PAM), a high-resolution configuration (3.5-8 km horizontal grid) based on the OPA ocean general circulation model. The meddies are coherent structures of warm and salt Mediterranean Water (MW) advected in the northeast Atlantic. A 5 year experiment performed with PAM reproduced the main observed characteristics of the meddies: thermohaline properties (11.8°C, 36 psu), sizes (radius between 25 and 110 km), thickness (between 500 and 1000 m), westward advection velocities (1.4 cm.s À1 ), angular velocities (a period of 20 days), a good estimate of the number of meddies in the northeast Atlantic ($22), and their realistic geographical distribution (80% south of 40°N). Moreover, and in agreement with a previous study based on an observation cruise, these modeled meddies represent half of the westward salinity transport of MW.

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“…The ocean engine of NEMO is the primitive equation model OPA (Océan Parallelisé; Madec et al, 1998) adapted to regional and global ocean circulation problems. NEMO is intended to be a flexible tool for studying the ocean and its interactions with the other components of Earth's climate system over a wide range of space-and timescales (Masson-Delmotte et al, 2006;Drillet et al, 2005;Barnier et al, 2006). An advantage of NEMO is its widespread use and continuous improvement by the scientific community (Rattan et al, 2010).…”

An operational model for the West Iberian coast: products and services

“…The 3-D model is also forced with a full offline baroclinic solution, the Mercator-Océan Psy2V3 (Psy 2 stands for the Greek letter followed by an integer which codenames a specific region of the NorthAtlantic, whereas V3 stands for version 3 of the system) hindcast and forecast for Western Iberia (Cailleau et al, 2010;Drillet, 2005) until December 2010 and the MercatorOcéan Psy2V4 (the upgraded version of the same region) from January 2011 onwards, with a coarser horizontal resolution than the MOHID model domain (1/12 • ) and with the same vertical Cartesian coordinate discretization (to reduce interpolation errors). The absence of tide in the Mercator solution is handled by linearly superimposing the 2-D model tidal reference solution to the Mercator reference solution according to the methodology described by Leitão et al (2005).…”

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“…Primitive equation models are being implemented and assessed at even higher resolution; recent studies show that they yield further dynamical improvements (e.g. Smith et al, 2000;McClean et al, 2002;Masumoto et al, 2004;Drillet et al, 2005;Treguier et al, 2005;Kelly et al, 2007;Chanut et al, 2008;Hecht and Smith, 2008;Hecht and Hasumi, 2008). Most of these simulations are presently restricted to either individual basins and/or decade-long integrations.…”