A simple exact treatment of the baroclinicity-bathymetry interaction in a frictional, iterative, diagnostic ocean model

Abstract

A formulation of the vorticity equation in terms of Ekman, baroclinic and barotropic transports, defined such that the bottom is the reference level-of-no-motion for the baroclinic velocity, yields a topographic-Sverdrup relation for the bottom pressure anomaly. This formulation does not contain the Jacobian term relating density to bathymetry found in earlier diagnostic formulations. As a consequence the resulting deep flow pattern is not sensitive to "noise" in the density field. The effects of bottom friction are introduced by an iterative scheme.