CODE

Cartesian coordinates Ocean model with three-Dimensional adaptive
mesh refinement and primitive Equations

Model description

CODE is a newly developed three-dimensional, primitive equations, z-level, coupled sea-ice/ocean model. The basic idea behind CODE is the simulation of basin-scale ocean dynamics (length scale in the order of 10000 km) including the small-scale structures, with length scales less than 10 km, of selected areas of interest. Additionally the computational costs of the simulation should be minimised to enable the computation of multi-decadal runs within an acceptable length of time. Both points could be realised using adaptive mesh refinement. Though this technique involves more complicated numerics the disadvantages of conventional nesting (higher computational effort, missing coupling between several model runs, numerical errors at open boundaries) or finite element (higher computational effort) approaches could be avoided. The current application which comprises the whole North Atlantic/Arctic Ocean with highly resolved (1 km) Icelandic waters, running on an Intel Core 2 Quad CPU, needs 25.2 hours for the simulation of one year.

1. Equations

2. Numerics