Assimilating Antarctic Sea-ice Thickness Data

A team, bringing together researchers from China, Europe, and the US, use MITgcm to develop a new data assimilation system for the Southern Ocean with the aim of improving sea-ice thickness estimates in the region.

In a new study, researchers from Scripps have been using MITgcm to evaluate the role form stress across bottom topography plays in balancing the input of stress by wind at the surface.

Dan Goldberg has been working with longtime MITgcmer Patrick Heimbach, looking at new ways to assimilate observations into glaciological flow models capable of representing fast streaming ice flow.

This month we focus on several recent papers that have used MITgcm and its adjoint to perform state estimates and explore its ocean forecasting capabilities in the Gulf of Mexico.

Nuno Serra from the University of Hamburg has used MITgcm in many ocean modeling projects, both from a process-modelling perspective and “realistically”, incorporating forcing from NCEP and ECMWF. He is especially interested in the processes regulating North Atlantic and North Pacific inter-annual to inter-decadal variability. A particular passion is overflows.

In a recent paper in the Journal of Physical Oceanography, An Nguyen (MIT) and co-authors Ronald Kwok (JPL) and Dimitris Menemenlis (JPL) report on work using MITgcm to better understand the origin and character of  the western arctic, upper halocline.

Familiar 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.

Prompted 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.

This month we look at work by Tom Haine, Professor of Physical Oceanography at Johns Hopkins University who is using MITgcm to model high-frequency fluctuations in the flow through the Denmark Strait…