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3.8 Barotropic Ocean Gyre In Cartesian Coordinates

This example experiment demonstrates using the MITgcm to simulate a Barotropic, wind-forced, ocean gyre circulation. The experiment is a numerical rendition of the gyre circulation problem similar to the problems described analytically by Stommel in 1966 [49] and numerically in Holland et. al [31].

In this experiment the model is configured to represent a rectangular enclosed box of fluid, $1200 \times 1200$ km in lateral extent. The fluid is km deep and is forced by a constant in time zonal wind stress, $\tau_x$ , that varies sinusoidally in the ``north-south'' direction. Topologically the grid is Cartesian and the coriolis parameter is defined according to a mid-latitude beta-plane equation

$\displaystyle f(y) = f_{0}+\beta y$

(3.1)

where is the distance along the ``north-south'' axis of the simulated domain. For this experiment $f_{0}$ is set to $10^{-4}s^{-1}$ in (3.1) and $\beta = 10^{-11}s^{-1}m^{-1}$ .

The sinusoidal wind-stress variations are defined according to

$\displaystyle \tau_x(y) = \tau_{0}\sin(\pi \frac{y}{L_y})$

(3.2)

where $L_{y}$ is the lateral domain extent ( km) and $\tau_0$ is set to $0.1N m^{-2}$ .

Figure 3.1 summarizes the configuration simulated.

**Figure 3.1:** Schematic of simulation domain and wind-stress forcing function for barotropic gyre numerical experiment. The domain is enclosed bu solid walls at 0,1200km and at 0,1200km.
$\begin{figure}\centerline{ \epsfxsize .95\textwidth \epsfbox{part3/case_studies/barotropic_gyre/simulation_config.eps} }\end{figure}$

Subsections

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