Hi everyone. I am an Hons student at UNSW working with Alex Sen Gupta and Matt England. I am constructing a heat budget for some marine heatwave events around Antarctica, using a 0.25 degree ERA-forced experiment (‘025deg_era5_iaf_1958cycle1’).
I have monthly data for sw_heat, and was wondering if anyone knew how this was calculated in the model. It says the penetrative shortwave heat, but I was wondering what the depth this term penetrates to? Is it shortwave heat through the mixed layer calculated by the model?
I also have pme_river at daily intervals. It says “mass flux of precip-evap+river via sbc (liquid, frozen, evaporation)” - I was wondering if captures the mass flux associated with sea ice melt, as it says frozen? I can see that this is it’s own indepenent term in monthly intervals.
My understanding is that pme_river does not include sea-ice melt/freeze. I guess the frozen in that description refers to frozen run-off from icebergs.
Hi @tom_schmaltz. Regarding sw_heat, I think most (all?) of the ACCESS-OM2 experiments use the MOM5 ocean_shortwave_gfdl module with optics_manizza = .true. and read_chl = .true.(you can confirm this by looking at ocean/input.nml for the experiment you are interested in).
This means that shortwave penetration is calculated following Manizza et al. 2005 (doi:10.1029/2004GL020778) using climatological chlorophyll concentrations from the provided input file (called chl.nc).
If you’re interested in looking at the code, this is where sw_heat is calculated based on the fractional sw penetration calculated here.