Hybrid Coordinate Ocean Model (HYCOM) Version 2.1. User's Guide

Abstract

The Hybrid Coordinate Ocean Model (HYCOM; (Halliwell et al., 1998, 2000; Bleck, 2001) was developed to address known shortcomings in the vertical coordinate scheme of the Miami Isopycnic-Coordinate Ocean Model (MICOM) developed by Rainer Bleck and colleagues. HYCOM is a primitive equation, general circulation model with vertical coordinates that remain isopycnic in the open, stratified ocean. However, the isopycnal vertical coordinates smoothly transition to z-coordinates in the weakly stratified upper-ocean mixed layer, to terrain-following sigma coordinates in shallow water regions, and back to z-level coordinates in very shallow water. The latter transition prevents layers from becoming too thin where the water is very shallow. The HYCOM user has control over setting up the model domain, generating the forcing fields, and ingesting either the climatology or output fields from other model simulations to use for boundary and interior relaxation. The model is fully parallelized and designed to be portable among all UNIX-based systems.

Open PDF

Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Jan 01, 2003
Accession Number
ADA588120

Entities

People

  • A. Wallcraft
  • K.a. Kelly
  • K.v. Rushing
  • S.n. Carroll

Organizations

  • United States Naval Research Laboratory

Tags

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Boundary Layer
  • Computer Programs
  • Data Sets
  • Diffusion
  • Environment
  • Grids
  • Heat Flux
  • Layers
  • Military Research
  • Operating Systems
  • Parallel Computing
  • Parallel Processing
  • Shallow Water
  • Shell Scripts
  • Standards
  • Three Dimensional
  • Two Dimensional

Fields of Study

  • Environmental science

Readers

  • Database Systems and Applications
  • Ocean-Atmosphere Mesoscale Modeling, Data Assimilation, and Flux Boundary Layers