Sensitivity of the tropical Atlantic to vertical mixing in two ocean models (ICON-O v2.6.6 and FESOM v2.5)

Abstract

Ocean general circulation models still have large upper-ocean biases, including in tropical sea surface temperature, that are possibly connected to the representation of vertical mixing. In earlier studies, the ocean vertical mixing parameterization has usually been tuned for a specific site or only within a specific model. We present here a systematic comparison of the effects of changes in the vertical mixing scheme in two different global ocean models, ICON-O and FESOM, run at a horizontal resolution of 10 km in the tropical Atlantic. We test two commonly used vertical mixing schemes: the K-profile parameterization (KPP) and the turbulent kinetic energy (TKE) scheme. Additionally, we vary tuning parameters in both schemes and test the addition of Langmuir turbulence in the TKE scheme. We show that the biases of mean sea surface temperature, subsurface temperature, subsurface currents, and mixed layer depth differ more between the two models than between runs with different mixing scheme settings within each model. For ICON-O, there is a larger difference between TKE and KPP than for FESOM. In both models, varying the tuning parameters hardly affects the pattern and magnitude of the mean state biases. For the representation of smaller-scale variability like the diurnal cycle or inertial waves, the choice of the mixing scheme can matter: the diurnally enhanced penetration of equatorial turbulence below the mixed layer is only simulated with TKE, not with KPP. However, tuning of the parameters within the mixing schemes does not lead to large improvements for these processes. We conclude that a substantial part of the upper-ocean tropical Atlantic biases is not sensitive to details of the vertical mixing scheme.