Modeling Nordic Seas II

Mean sea surface temperature and bottom topography - source: Vaage et al. (2011)Mike Spall, a Senior Scientist in the Physical Oceanography Group at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, has been using MITgcm to understand newly observed characteristics of the Denmark Strait Overflow.

August 31, 2011 by Helen Hill

Baroclinic Instability in the Ocean

Global maps of inverse Eady time scale (days−1) (upper panel) and the ratio Lbci/Ldef (lower panel) - source Tulloch et al., 2011.In a new JPO paper, Ross Tulloch, John Marshall, Chris Hill and Shafer Smith report on an observational, modeling and theoretical study of the scales, growth rates and spectral fluxes of baroclinic instability in the ocean, permitting a discussion of the relation between the instability scale, the first baroclinic deformation scale (R1) and the equilibrated eddy scale.

July 28, 2011 by Helen Hill

Mixing it up…

Mixing by eddiesMalte Jansen is a third year graduate student in PAOC at MIT. He has been using MITgcm in an idealized study to explore how mixing by eddies may influence the equilibrium state of the extra-tropical atmosphere and the Southern Ocean and in particular why the two regimes exhibit such a different equilibrium state.

June 29, 2011 by Helen Hill

Arctic Carbon Cycle Modeling

Arctic Biogeochemical Model - Change in Surface Net Community Production, year-on-year between 2006 and 2007 using MITgcm. Motivated by observations indicating rapidly falling annual sea-ice minima, Manfredi Manizza and co-workers have been using an Arctic configuration of MITgcm to explore the Arctic Ocean Carbon Cycle.

April 29, 2011 by Helen Hill

Modeling the Ocean Response to Hurricanes

Hurricane IsabelFamiliar as we are with satellite images of hurricanes, the impact of these powerful storms on the upper ocean is markedly less visible. Dr Sarah Zedler (Texas A&M University) has been using MITgcm to help understand the features that appear in oceanic field data as a result of hurricane passage above.

March 31, 2011 by Helen Hill

Visualizing Earth Science Data

Visualizing Earth Science DataHow would you explain the large scale pattern of weather fronts to a general audience? Roman Kowch, an undergraduate major in EAPS, has been exploring one way; as part of a UROP project with Lodovica Illari, Chris Hill and Constantinos Evangelinos.

February 28, 2011 by Helen Hill

Adjoint approaches to assessing local vulnerability to buoyant surface plumes

Spreading of a buoyant surface plume modeled using MITgcmPrompted by the recent spill in the Gulf of Mexico, Ross Tulloch, Chris Hill and Oliver Jahn have been using MITgcm to compute the vulnerability of individual locations to remote buoyant surface plumes.

January 31, 2011 by Helen Hill

2010 Research Round-Up

publish or perish
As we did last year we have collected a sample of 2010 research articles that involved MITgcm in some way. Take a look…

December 31, 2010 by Helen Hill

Modeling Internal Solitary Waves, MITgcm.eu

Modeling Internal Standing Waves using MITgcmThis month we look at work by Nicolas Grisouard and Chantal Staquet of the Laboratoire des Ecoulements Geophysiques et Industriels, Grenoble, France, who have been using MITgcm to model internal solitary waves (ISWs) of a kind observed in the Bay of Biscay.

October 31, 2010 by Helen Hill

MITgcm Movie Mania

A selection of MITgcm moviesWhat is it about MITgcm that it spawns so many great movies? In a break with science stories, MITgcm shares 3 recent movies showcasing projects using MITgcm.

September 30, 2010 by Helen Hill