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Next: 3.11.1 Advection and tracer
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3.11 Ocean Gyre Advection Schemes
(in directory: verification/tutorial_advection_in_gyre/)
Author: Oliver Jahn and Chris Hill
This set of examples is based on the barotropic and baroclinic gyre MITgcm configurations,
that are described in the tutorial sections 3.9 and 3.10.
The examples in this section explain how to introduce a passive tracer into the flow
field of the barotropic and baroclinic gyre setups and looks at how the time evolution
of the passive tracer depends on the advection or transport scheme that is selected
for the tracer.
Passive tracers are useful in many numerical experiments. In some cases tracers are
used to track flow pathways, for example in Dutay et al. [2002] a passive tracer is used
to track pathways of CFC-11 in 13 global ocean models, using a numerical
configuration similar to the example described in section 3.20.5).
In other cases tracers are used as a way
to infer bulk mixing coefficients for a turbulent flow field, for example in
Marshall et al. [2006] a tracer is used to infer eddy mixing coefficients in the
Antarctic Circumpolar Current region. In biogeochemical and ecological simulations large numbers
of tracers are used that carry the concentrations of biological nutrients and concentrations of
biological species, for example in ....
When using tracers for these and other purposes it is useful to have a feel for the role
that the advection scheme employed plays in determining properties of the tracer distribution.
In particular, in a discrete numerical model tracer advection only approximates the
continuum behavior in space and time and different advection schemes introduce diferent
approximations so that the resulting tracer distributions vary. In the following
text we illustrate how
to use the different advection schemes available in MITgcm here, and discuss which properties
are well represented by each one. The advection schemes selections also apply to active
tracers (e.g. 
and 
) and the character of the schemes also affect their distributions
and behavior.
Subsections
Next: 3.11.1 Advection and tracer
Up: 3. Getting Started with
Previous: 3.10.5 Running The Example
Contents
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