Preliminary results of assessing the mixing of wave transport flux residualin the upper ocean with ROMS

Abstract

The effects of the mixing of wave transport flux residual (Bvl) on the upper ocean is studied through carrying out the control run (CR) and a series of sensitive runs (SR) with ROMS model. In this study, the important role of Bvl is revealed by comparing the ocean temperature, statistical analysis of errors and evaluating the mixed layer depth. It is shown that the overestimated SST is improved effectively when the wave-induced mixing is incorporated to the vertical mixing scheme. As can be seen from the vertical structure of temperature 28°C isotherm changes from 20 min CR to 35 m in SR3, which is more close to the observation. Statistic analysis shows that the root-mean-square errors of the temperature in 10 m are reduced and the correlation between model results and observation data are increased after considering the effect of Bvl. The numerical results of the ocean temperature show improvement in summer and in tropical zones in winter, especially in the strong current regions in summer. In August the mixed layer depth (MLD) which is defined as the depth that the temperature has changed 0.5°C from the reference depth of 10 m is further analyzed. The simulation results have a close relationship with undetermined coefficient of Bvl, sensitivity studies show that a coefficient about 0.1 is reasonable value in the model.