The TRR 181 seminar Series/Joint Seminar is held by Alistair Adcroft (GFDL, Princeton, USA) on April 4th, 1:30 pm in Bundesstr. 53, Hamburg, room 22/23.

Ocean heat uptake in the era of eddying ocean models and AI 

Abstract

The oceans and ice components contribute to the seasonal and longer time scales in the earth system. Ocean heat (and carbon) uptake is controlled by a combination of short space-and-time scale processes at the air-sea interface and slower processes connecting to the abyssal ocean which acts as an immense reservoir. Of these processes, mesoscale eddies play a major role in the vertical redistribution of heat within the ocean and we know that the balance of terms in a model heat budget is strongly dependent on how well eddies are resolved (or otherwise represented by parameterizations). We also have demonstrated that the formulation and numerical methods can lead to severe distortion of the heat budget, partly due to spurious numerical mixing. Application of machine learning in ocean modeling needs to meet the same requirements as numerics and physical parameterizations for the resulting heat budget to be trusted. With the transition to routine eddy-permitting or eddy-resolving models, and the advent of hybrid-ML models and ocean emulators, we discuss where we stand with respect to the fidelity of the representation of ocean heat uptake. We’ll take a deep dive into several aspects of the problem, ranging from the choice of numerical methods to the question of parameterization-vs-resolution.