This book offers a comprehensive overview of the models and methods employed in the rapidly advancing field of numerical ocean circulation modeling. For those new to the field, concise reviews of the equations of oceanic motion, sub-grid-scale parameterization, and numerical approximation techniques are presented and four specific numerical models, chosen to span the range of current practice, are described in detail. For more advanced users, a suite of model test problems is developed to illustrate the differences among models, and to serve as a first stage in the quantitative evaluation of future algorithms. The extensive list of references makes this book a valuable text for both graduate students and postdoctoral researchers in the marine sciences and in related fields such as meteorology, and climate and coupled biogeochemical modeling.
Contents:
- The Continuous Equations
- The 1D Heat and Wave Equations
- Considerations in Two Dimensions
- Three-Dimensional Ocean Models
- Subgridscale Parameterization
- Process-Oriented Test Problems
- Simulation of the North Atlantic
- The Final Frontier
Readership: Oceanographers and geoscientists.
Dale B Haidvogel has been a leader in the development and application of alternative numerical ocean circulation models for nearly two decades. Since receiving his PhD in Physical Oceanography from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in 1976, his research activities have spanned the range from idealized studies of fundamental oceanic processes through the realistic modeling of coastal and marine environments. He currently holds the position of Professor II in the Institute of Marine and Coastal Sciences at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey.
Aike Beckmann received his PhD in oceanography from the Institute for Marine Research in Kiel, Germany, and has been working in the field of numerical ocean modeling since 1984. His research interests include both high-resolution process studies and large-scale simulations of ocean dynamics, with special emphasis on topographic effects. He is currently a senior research scientist at the Alfred-Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research in Bremerhaven, Germany, where he heads a group working on high-latitude ocean and ice dynamics.