nonhydro

The ocean/nonhydro test group implements test cases from Vitousek et al. (2014) to validate the nonhydrostatic capability of MPAS-O.

The test group includes 2 test cases. The first one describes a continuously-stratified internal seiche and is presented in section 5.3 in Vitousek et al. (2014). The second one describes internal solitary waves and is presented in section 5.5. All test cases have 4 steps: initial_state, which defines the mesh and initial conditions for the model, hydro, which performs time integration of the standard hydrostatic model, nonhydro, which performs time integration of the nonhydrostaic version of MPAS-O, and finally visualize, which compares the solutions obtained with the hydrostatic and nonhydrostatic model.

stratified_seiche

The domain is a 10mx10m box discretized in the horizontal with 64 cells and in the vertical with 100 layers. The initial density depends on the hyperbolic tangent of an internal cosine wave, and density contours are localized at the stratified interface. The set config options for this test case are:

# config options for the horizontal grid
[horizontal_grid]

#Number of cells in the x-direction
nx = 64

#Number of cells in the y-direction
ny = 4

#Distance from two cell centers
dc = 0.15625

# config options for the seiche testcase
[stratified_seiche]

#Depth of the bottom of the ocean
maxDepth = 16.0

#Number of vertical levels
nVertLevels = 100

#Alpha in eos
eos_linear_alpha = 0.2

#Beta in eos
eos_linear_beta = 0.8

#Reference temperature
eos_linear_Tref = 10.0

#Reference salinity
eos_linear_Sref = 35.0

#Reference density
eos_linear_densityref = 1000.0

#Density difference
deltaRho = 10.0

#Interface thickness
interfaceThick = 1.0

#Wave amplitude
amplitude = 0.1

#Wavenumber
wavenumber = 0.314159265358979

The hydrostatic and nonhydrostatic simulations are run for one period (50s) using RK4 with a time-step of 0.01s. A plot is produced at time t = 12s showing the horizontal and vertical velocity profiles normalized by their respective maxima at locations x=5m and x=0m, respectively. The nonhydrostatic profiles coincide with first-mode linearized eigenfunction analysis for this kind of problem presented in Fringer et al. (2003)

internal_wave

This test case approximates the evolution of solitary-like waves in the South China Sea. The domain has a length L of 300 km and depth H of 2000 m, and it discretized with 1200 cells in the horizontal and 100 layers in the vertical. The initial density depends on the hyperbolic tangent of a Gaussian depression, and then evolves into a train of solitary-like waves. The set config options for this test case are:

# config options for the horizontal grid
[horizontal_grid]

#Number of cells in the x-direction
nx = 1200

#Number of cells in the y-direction
ny = 4

#Distance from two cell centers
dc = 250.0

# config options for the solitary wave testcase
[solitary_wave]

#Depth of the bottom of the ocean
maxDepth = 2000.0

#Number of vertical levels
nVertLevels = 100

#Alpha in eos
eos_linear_alpha = 0.2

#Beta in eos
eos_linear_beta = 0.8

#Reference temperature
eos_linear_Tref = 10.0

#Reference salinity
eos_linear_Sref = 35.0

#Reference density
eos_linear_densityref = 1000.0

#Upper-layer depth
h1 = 250.0

#Density difference
deltaRho = 1.0

#Wave interface thickness
interfaceThick = 200.0

#Wave amplitude
amplitude = 250.0

#Wavelenght
wavelenght = 15000.0

The hydrostatic and nonhydrostatic simulations are run for 40h using split-explicit with a baroclinic time-step of 1min and a barotropic time-step of 1s. A plot at 40h is produced and shows that the nonhydrostatic result leads to a train of rank-ordered solitary-like internal gravity waves, whereas the hydrostatic model fails to capture correct physics.