Open-ocean tides simulated by ICON-O, version icon-2.6.6

Abstract

Abstract. This paper evaluates barotropic tides simulated by a newly developed multi-layer ocean general circulation, ICON-O, and assesses processes and model configurations that can impact the quality of the simulated tides. Such an investigation is crucial for applications addressing internal tides that are much more difficult to evaluate than the barotropic tides. Although not specially tuned for tides and not constrained by any observations, ICON-O is capable of producing the main features of the open-ocean barotropic tides as described by the geographical distributions of amplitude, phase, and amphidromic points. An error analysis shows, however, that the open-ocean tides simulated by ICON-O are less accurate than those simulated by two other ocean general circulation models (OGCMs), especially when not properly adjusting the time step and the parameters used in the time-stepping scheme. Based on a suite of tidal experiments, we show that an increase in horizontal resolution only improves tides in shallow waters. Relevant for using ICON-O with its telescoping grid capacity, we show that spatial inhomogeneity does not deteriorate the quality of the simulated tides. We further show that implementing a parameterization of topographic wave drag improves the quality of the simulated tides in deep ocean independent of the model configuration used, whereas the implementation of a self-attraction and loading (SAL) parameterization in a low-resolution (40 km) version of ICON-O degrades the quality of tides in shallow ocean. Finally, we show that the quality of tides simulated by ICON-O with low resolution (40 km) can be significantly improved by adjusting the time step or the parameters in the time-stepping scheme used for obtaining the model solution.