Numerical Ocean Circulation Modeling

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.