For equatorial/tropical Pacific verification, I would suggest the following:
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Vertical profiles of temperature and zonal velocity compared to observations from the TAO array at key locations (e.g. 140W and 110W on the Equator). Example plots are already in COSIMA recipes (see the “Plot vertical profiles at the Equator compared to TAO, Johnson and WOA13 data” section of this notebook). The Johnson data set is pretty old now and comparing with it suffers from the issue of non-matching temporal periods (a particular issue in this region given the large internal variability). The comparison with TAO can be done robustly by restricting to times when observations exist (I have some code to do this somewhere, can dig it up if needed).
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Equatorial slices of temperature bias compared to WOA13 (see “Plot longitude-depth temperature bias to WOA13” of this notebook, also see this notebook and Fig. 12 of Holmes et al. 2021). This will be really interesting to compare with the original ACCESS-OM2 biases because we expect that ACCESS-OM3 (depending on the vertical coordinate used) may have reduced spurious mixing that seems to have a big impact on the equatorial thermocline structure (Holmes et al. 2021).
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Plots of Tropical Instability Wave SST and SSH variance compared to satellite observations. TIWs have a big impact on the equatorial heat budget and are particularly weak in ACCESS-OM2, and in fact in most models in OMIP-2, as described/summarized in this notebook/write-up. Again, the different numerics in ACCESS-OM3 may result in different TIWs.