Volume and heat transports in the world oceans from an ocean general circulation model

• Autor(a) principal: Assad,Luiz Paulo de Freitas
• Data de Publicação: 2009
• Outros Autores: Torres Junior,Audalio Rebelo, Arruda,Wilton Zumpichiatti, Mascarenhas Junior,Affonso da Silveira, Landau,Luiz
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Revista Brasileira de Geofísica (Online)
• Texto Completo: http://old.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0102-261X2009000200003
• topic: ocean climate; computational modeling; volume transport; heat transport

Monitoring the volume and heat transports around the world oceans is of fundamental importance in the study of the climate system, its variability, and possible changes. The application of an Oceanic General Circulation Model for climatic studies needs that its dynamic and thermodynamic fields are in equilibrium. The time spent by the model to reach this equilibrium is called spin-up time. This work presents some results obtained from the application of the Modular Ocean Model version 4.0 initialized with temperature, salinity, velocity and sea surface height data already in equilibrium from an ocean data assimilation experiment conducted by Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (GFDL). The use of this dataset as initial condition aimed to diminish the spin-up time of the oceanic model. The model was integrated for seven years. Volume and heat transports in different sections around the world oceans showed to be in good agreement with the literature. The results showed a well defined seasonal cycle starting at the second integration year, also some important dynamic and thermodynamic aspects of the Global Ocean Circulation, as the great conveyor belt, are well reproduced. The obtained results could constitute an important data source to be used as initial and boundary conditions in regional ocean model experiments as well as for long integration runs in order to study oceanic climate variability.