Estimation of Oceanic Eddy Viscosity Profile and Wind Stress Drag Coefficient Using Adjoint Method

Abstract

Adjoint method is used to assimilate pseudoobservations to simultaneously estimate the OEVP and the WSDC in an oceanic Ekman layer model. Five groups of experiments are designed to investigate the influences that the optimization algorithms, step-length, inverse integral time of the adjoint model, prescribed vertical distribution of eddy viscosity, and regularization parameter exert on the inversion results. Experimental results show that the best estimation results are obtained with the GD algorithm; the best estimation results are obtained when the step-length is equal to 1 in Group 2; in Group 3, 8 days of inverse integral time yields the best estimation results, and good assimilation efficiency is achieved by increasing iteration steps when the inverse integral time is reduced; in Group 4, the OEVP can be estimated for some specific distributions; however, when the VEVCs increase along with the depth at the bottom of water, the estimation results are relatively poor. For this problem, we use extrapolation method to deal with the VEVCs in layers in which the estimation results are poor; the regularization method with appropriate regularization parameter can indeed improve the experiment result to some extent. In all experiments in Groups 2-3, the WSDCs are inverted successfully within 100 iterations.