MPAS-Ocean is designed for the simulation of the ocean system from time scales of months to millenia and spatial scales from sub 1 km to global circulations.

MPAS-Ocean has demonstrated the ability to accurately reproduce mesoscale ocean activity with a local mesh refinement strategy.

In addition to faciliating the study of multiscale phenomena within the ocean system, MPAS-Ocean is intended for the study of anthropogenic climate change as the ocean component of climate system models.

MPAS-Ocean is presently developed and maintained by the ocean model development team within the COSIM project at Los Alamos National Laboratory.

The primary sponsor for the development of MPAS-Ocean is the Climate and Environmental Sciences Division within the Department of Energy.

This ocean model is being developed for use within the Department of Energy's Energy Exascale Earth System Model (E3SM).

Please reference the following manuscripts when introducing MPAS-Ocean:

• Ringler, T., Petersen, M., Higdon, R. L., Jacobsen, D., Jones, P. W., & Maltrud, M. (2013). Ocean Modelling. Ocean Modelling, 69(C), 211–232. doi:10.1016/j.ocemod.2013.04.010 (pdf)
• Petersen, M. R., Asay‐Davis, X. S., Berres, A. S., Chen, Q., Feige, N., Hoffman, M. J., et al. (2019). An evaluation of the ocean and sea ice climate of E3SM using MPAS and interannual CORE‐II forcing. Journal of Advances in Modeling Earth Systems, 11, 1438– 1458. https://doi.org/10.1029/2018MS001373
• Golaz, J.‐C., Caldwell, P. M., Van Roekel, L. P., Petersen, M. R., Tang, Q., Wolfe, J. D., et al. (2019). The DOE E3SM coupled model version 1: Overview and evaluation at standard resolution. Journal of Advances in Modeling Earth Systems, 11, 2089– 2129. https://doi.org/10.1029/2018MS001603