Development of a multi-scale ocean model by using particle Laplacian method for anisotropic mass transfer

Abstract

The direct injection of CO2 into the deep ocean is one of the feasible ways for the mitigation of the global warming, although there is a concern about its environmental impact near the injection point. To minimize its biological impact, it is necessary to make CO2 disperse as quickly as possible, and it is said that injection with a pipe towed by a moving ship is effective for this purpose. Because the injection ship moves over a spatial scale of O(102km), a mesoscale model is necessary to analyse the dispersion of CO2. At the same time, since it is important to investigate high CO2 concentration near the injection point, a small-scale model is also required. Therefore, in this study, a numerical model was developed to analyse CO2 dispersion in the deep ocean by using a fixed mesoscale and a moving small-scale grid systems, the latter of which is nested and moves in the former along the trajectory of the moving ship. To overcome the artificial diffusion of mass concentration at the interface of the two different grid systems and to keep its spatial accuracy almost the same as that in the small-scale, a particle Laplacian method was adopted and newly modified for anisotropic diffusion in the ocean. © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd..