An isopycnal ocean circulation model of the North Sea for dynamical downscaling

A regional version of the ocean general circulation model OPYC is presented. Lateral open boundaries and a barotropic tide model are incorporated and the model is applied for a shelf region, the North Sea. The modelled region includes the Greenland-Iceland-Norwegian Seas and the north-eastern part of the North Atlantic. The horizontal resolution is 1/2 x 1/2 with resolution enhanced to 1/10 x 1/10 in the North Sea. The vertical is discretized with 14 Lagrangian layers and the surface mixed layer. This report describes the technical layout of the model and discusses the climatological mean state of a 35-year spinup run. It demonstrates that this model setup can be used to downscale coarse resolution data of the ECMWF reanalysis project or for climate change experiments as obtained from coupled ocean-atmosphere models. In a simple downscaling example possible changes in the tides for an uniform increase in the sea level elevation of 1 metre at the lateral boundaries are estimated. (orig.)37 refs.SIGLEAvailable from TIB Hannover: RA 3251(97/E/47) / FIZ - Fachinformationszzentrum Karlsruhe / TIB - Technische InformationsbibliothekDEGerman