•The use of hybrid
vertical coordinates and improved vertical mixing algorithms improved the quality of model
simulations.
–Improved
representation of subtropical mode water.
–Improved horizontal
mixed layer salinity distribution in the subtropical gyre.
–Improved resolution of
tropical upper-ocean flow.
–Explicit resolution of
upper-ocean wind driven flow
•HYCOM run in MICOM
mode produced results extremely close to MICOM 2.8, indicating that code changes in HYCOM did not
degrade the quality of the solution.
•Many observed
shortcomings of these HYCOM simulations can be traced to the lack of an ice model, surface forcing errors, the
simple initial conditions, and the lack
of river runoff.
•The choice of which
two thermodynamical variables are advected and also mixed in the vertical coordinate adjustment algorithm
did not have a noticeable influence on
the solutions even though in the KPP (theta-S) experiment, temperature was not conserved.