Abstract
A newly developed coastal model, FESOM-C, based on three-dimensional unstructured meshes and finite volume, is applied to simulate the dynamics of the southeastern North Sea. Variable horizontal resolution enables coarse meshes in the open sea with refined meshes in shallow areas including the Wadden Sea and estuaries to resolve important small-scale processes such as wetting and drying, sub-mesoscale eddies, and the dynamics of steep coastal fronts. Model results for a simulation of the period from January 2010 to December 2014 agree reasonably well with data from numerous regional autonomous observation stations with high temporal and spatial resolutions, as well as with data from FerryBoxes and glider expeditions. Analyzing numerical solution convergence on meshes of different horizontal resolutions allows us to identify areas where high mesh resolution (wetting and drying zones and shallow areas) and low mesh resolution (open boundary, open sea, and deep regions) are optimal for numerical simulations.
Highlights
Numerical ocean models are one of the major instruments used to understand ocean dynamics.Their area of application is usually divided into global or open ocean models, regional models, and models capable of representing estuaries or certain specific processes
Such limitations usually result from the finite difference method used to discretize dynamical equations in the most well-known, established models: NEMO [2], ROMS [3], MOM [4], GETM [5], and many others
We provide a basic validation of the simulation carried out on a mesh with variable resolutions of about –4 km in the SeNS area for the five years from 2010 to 2014
Summary
Numerical ocean models are one of the major instruments used to understand ocean dynamics.Their area of application is usually divided into global or open ocean models (with resolutions from a few up to several tens of kilometers), regional models (that include coastal seas and whose scales are typically one to two nautical miles), and models capable of representing estuaries or certain specific processes (with horizontal scales in meters). Tides are commonly excluded from the global ocean models used in climate simulations (as in, e.g., [1]) but are dominant in the dynamics of coastal regions Another significant reason is a limitation on horizontal discretization: models for larger domains use coarser horizontal resolutions to speed up numerical calculations, parameterizing or disregarding small-scale processes. Such limitations usually result from the finite difference method used to discretize dynamical equations in the most well-known, established models: NEMO [2], ROMS [3], MOM [4], GETM [5], and many others. While the finite difference method yields realizations quickly and it is only applicable to structured meshes, making it nearly
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