Identification

Title

Assessing the skill of the improved treatment of riverine freshwater in the Community Earth System Model (CESM) relative to a new salinity climatology

Abstract

Recent studies have explored the sensitivity of global ocean model simulations to the treatment of riverine freshwater and the representation of estuarine processes via an estuary box model applied within the Community Earth System Model (CESM). This study builds on these efforts by assessing the model skill score relative to a new salinity climatology. The new climatology averages the original observational data of the World Ocean Database directly onto the CESM ocean component tracer grid cells without spatial interpolation, smoothing, or other gap‐filling techniques to mitigate coastal ocean salinity bias present in the World Ocean Atlas. The mean square error for coastal upper ocean salinity relative to climatology is reduced by up to 14%, and the mean square error of near‐surface salinity stratification is reduced by up to 28% near major river mouths in the simulations with improved treatments of river runoff. The improvement in upper ocean bulk salinity is attributed primarily to focusing runoff as point sources thereby avoiding the artificial horizontal spreading of the control run and to applying a locally varying instead of a global constant reference salinity for riverine virtual salt fluxes. The improvements in near‐surface salinity stratification are primarily attributed to adding parameterized estuarine mixing with the estuary box model. Salinity and salinity stratification skill improvements are achieved not just near large rivers but also along the global coast and skill improvements extend far offshore. Despite these improvements, many other sources of model‐climatology mismatch in coastal salinity and stratification remain and merit further attention.

Resource type

document

Resource locator

Unique resource identifier

code

http://n2t.net/ark:/85065/d7154kn7

codeSpace

Dataset language

eng

Spatial reference system

code identifying the spatial reference system

Classification of spatial data and services

Topic category

geoscientificInformation

Keywords

Keyword set

keyword value

Text

originating controlled vocabulary

title

Resource Type

reference date

date type

publication

effective date

2016-01-01T00:00:00Z

Geographic location

West bounding longitude

East bounding longitude

North bounding latitude

South bounding latitude

Temporal reference

Temporal extent

Begin position

End position

Dataset reference date

date type

publication

effective date

2019-05-01T00:00:00Z

Frequency of update

Quality and validity

Lineage

Conformity

Data format

name of format

version of format

Constraints related to access and use

Constraint set

Use constraints

Limitations on public access

None

Responsible organisations

Responsible party

contact position

OpenSky Support

organisation name

UCAR/NCAR - Library

full postal address

PO Box 3000

Boulder

80307-3000

email address

opensky@ucar.edu

web address

http://opensky.ucar.edu/

name: homepage

responsible party role

pointOfContact

Metadata on metadata

Metadata point of contact