A nonhydrostatic formulation for MPAS-Ocean

Abstract

The Model for Prediction Across Scales-Ocean (MPAS-Ocean) is an open-source, global ocean model and is one component of a family of climate models within the MPAS framework, including atmosphere, sea-ice, and land-ice models. In this work, a new formulation for the ocean model is presented that solves the nonhydrostatic, incompressible Boussinesq equations on an unstructured, staggered, z-level grid. The introduction of this nonhydrostatic capability is necessary for the resolution of internal wave dynamics and large eddy simulations. Compared to the standard, hydrostatic formulation, a nonhydrostatic pressure solver and a vertical momentum equation are added, where the PETSc (Portable Extensible Toolkit for Scientific Computation) library is used for the inversion of a large sparse system for the nonhydrostatic pressure. Numerical results on a stratified seiche, internal solitary wave, overflow and lock-exchange test cases are presented, and the parallel efficiency of the code is evaluated using up to 1024 processors.