Oral Presentation AMOS Annual Meeting and International Conference on Tropical Meteorology and Oceanography

The ACCESS-OM2 coupled global ocean - sea ice model suite (#172)

Andrew E Kiss 1 , Andrew McC Hogg 1 , Nicholas Hannah 2 , Petra Heil 3 4 , Paul Spence 5 , Matthew England 5 , Gary Brassington 6 , Russell Fiedler 7 , Aidan Heerdegen 1 , Marshall Ward 8 , Peter Oke 7 , Abhishek Savita 4 , Kial Stewart 1 , Adele Morrison 1 , Ryan Holmes 5 , Christopher Chapman 7 , Fabio Dias 4 , Simon Marsland 9 , Stephen Griffies 10
  1. The Australian National University, Canberra, ACT, Australia
  2. Double Precision, Sydney
  3. Australian Antarctic Division, Hobart
  4. University of Tasmania, Hobart
  5. University of New South Wales, Sydney
  6. Bureau of Meteorology, Sydney
  7. CSIRO, Hobart
  8. NCI, Canberra
  9. CSIRO, Aspendale
  10. GFDL, Princeton

The Consortium for Ocean-Sea Ice Modelling in Australia (COSIMA) has developed ACCESS-OM2, a global coupled ocean and sea ice model suite at 1, 1/4 and 1/10 degree horizontal resolution. The model consists of the MOM5.1 ocean model and the CICE5.1 sea ice model, coupled via OASIS3-MCT and driven by prescribed (JRA55-do) atmospheric forcing. The model suite and output data are intended as a national resource for ocean and sea ice research from regional to global scales and operational to climate timescales. The 1-degree and 1/4-degree configurations are useful for multi-century ocean-ice experiments, whilst the 1/10-degree model explicitly resolves mesoscale eddy processes at most latitudes and is intended to form the dynamical core of the next generation of Bluelink, extending it to include fully global coverage, improved vertical resolution, and sea ice. The model suite is accessible and straightforward for new users to set up, run and analyse, is publicly developed (see https://github.com/OceansAus/access-om2) and includes analysis tools (https://github.com/OceansAus/cosima-cookbook). An overview will be given of the model configurations, followed by an assessment of the model performance at these three resolutions relative to ocean and sea ice observations.