OWS Papa

This scenario is a classical scenario for the Northern Pacific, for which long term observations of meteorological parameters and temperature profiles are available. The station Papa at 145 deg W, 50 deg N has the advantage that it is situated in a region where the horizontal advection of heat and salt is assumed to be small. Various authors used these data for validating turbulence closure schemes.

The way how bulk formulae for the surface momentum and heat fluxes have been used here is discussed in detail in Burchard et al. (1999).

Here, 12 different model configurations are used, each contained in a different yaml file. Here is the list of the yaml files included:

1. gotm_cvmix_era5.yaml
2. gotm_cvmix_flux.yaml
3. gotm_cvmix_legacy.yaml
4. gotm_cvmix_meteo.yaml
5. gotm_keps_era5.yaml
6. gotm_keps_flux.yaml
7. gotm_keps_legacy.yaml
8. gotm_keps_meteo.yaml
9. gotm_kw_era5.yaml
10. gotm_kw_flux.yaml
11. gotm_kw_legacy.yaml
12. gotm_kw_meteo.yaml

The difference between the model simulations are given in terms of

(i) three different turbulence closure models, indicated by keps (for the k-epsilon model), kw (for the k-omega model) and cvmix (for the KPP model inside the cvmix environment);

(ii) four different sets of forcing types, indicated by era5 (for meteo files from the ERA5 reanalysis), meteo (for meteo files from observations), flux (for air-sea fluxes precalculated from observed meteorology) and legacy (for the original flux-driven scenario described by Burchard and Bolding (2001).

Different forcing scenarios will use different simulation periods.

It can be seen that for multi-annual flux-driven scenarios a drift in temperature occurs due to missing feedback between sea surface temperature and air temperature.

The default yaml file is set to gotm_keps_era5.yaml.

For further information, see Burchard and Bolding (2001) and Li et al. (2021).