Improvements in LICOM2. Part II: Arctic Circulation

Abstract

Abstract A known issue of the National Key Laboratory of Numerical Modeling for Atmospheric Sciences and Geophysical Fluid Dynamics/Institute of Atmospheric Physics Climate Ocean Model, version 2 (LICOM2, the standard version) is the use of an artificial island in the Arctic Ocean. The computational instability in the polar region seriously influences the model performance in terms of the Arctic circulation. The above-mentioned instability was originally attributed to the converging zonal grids in the polar region. However, this study finds that better computational stability could be achieved in an improved version of LICOM2 (i.e., LICOM2_imp) after four improvements on implementations of the vertical mixing, mesoscale eddy parameterization, and bottom drag schemes. LICOM2_imp is then able to reduce the aforesaid artificial island to a point (i.e., the North Pole). Two experiments of 650-yr integration by LICOM2_imp are carried out using different bathymetries: Exp IMPV0 with the artificial island (88°–90°N) and IMPV1 with only the single pole. The focus of this paper is on the Arctic circulation. Exp IMPV1 gives a more reasonable distribution of salinity and temperature in the Arctic Ocean, a more accurate location of the center of the Beaufort Gyre, and a better net volume flux of the transpolar drift. With more realistic bathymetry in the Arctic Ocean, the biases of net volume fluxes across the Fram Strait, Barents Sea Opening, and Barents Sea Exit are reduced from 1.71 to 1.56, from 0.23 to 0.10, and from 0.71 to 0.45 Sv (1 Sv ≡ 106 m3 s−1), respectively, closer to the observations. The large biases of the net volume fluxes at the Fram Strait in both experiments may be attributed to the closed Nares Strait and other straits/channels in the Canadian Arctic Archipelago.