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

Bastin, Swantje; Koldunov, Aleksei; Schütte, Florian; Gutjahr, Oliver; Mrozowska, Marta Agnieszka; Fischer, Tim; Shevchenko, Radomyra; Kumar, Arjun; Koldunov, Nikolay; Haak, Helmuth; Brüggemann, Nils; Hummels, Rebecca; Specht, Mia Sophie; Jungclaus, Johann; Danilov, Sergey; Dengler, Marcus; Jochum, Markus

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-18-1189-2025

Articles | Volume 18, issue 4

https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-18-1189-2025

© Author(s) 2025. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-18-1189-2025

© Author(s) 2025. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Articles | Volume 18, issue 4

Model evaluation paper

|

28 Feb 2025

Model evaluation paper |

| 28 Feb 2025

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

Swantje Bastin, Aleksei Koldunov, Florian Schütte, Oliver Gutjahr, Marta Agnieszka Mrozowska, Tim Fischer, Radomyra Shevchenko, Arjun Kumar, Nikolay Koldunov, Helmuth Haak, Nils Brüggemann, Rebecca Hummels, Mia Sophie Specht, Johann Jungclaus, Sergey Danilov, Marcus Dengler, and Markus Jochum

Data sets

High frequency tropical Atlantic data from vertical mixing sensitivity runs with FESOM and ICON-O (nextGEMS WP6) S. Bastin et al. https://doi.org/10.26050/WDCC/nextGEMS_WP6oc

Interannual variability of the Atlantic North Equatorial Undercurrent and its impact on oxygen K. Burmeister et al. https://doi.org/10.1594/PANGAEA.899052

Argo float data and metadata from Global Data Assembly Centre (Argo GDAC) Argo https://doi.org/10.17882/42182

Model code and software

FESOM2. Version for Bastin et al. S. Danilov et al. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10617977

icon-2.6.6-swbvmix H. Haak and S. Bastin https://doi.org/10.17617/3.KUFQAM

Short summary

Vertical mixing is an important process, for example, for tropical sea surface temperature, but cannot be resolved by ocean models. Comparisons of mixing schemes and settings have usually been done with a single model, sometimes yielding conflicting results. We systematically compare two widely used schemes with different parameter settings in two different ocean models and show that most effects from mixing scheme parameter changes are model-dependent.