Primary goal of the Ocean and Sea-ice Modeling group is to understand the physical processes of the global ocean/sea-ice system. Dynamics of ocean currents and their variability over the past decades, the distribution and transport of heat and salt, how sea-ice variability can affect the global thermohaline circulation are some of our main research topics.
Numerical modeling is the principal tool used for those studies that require scientific and technical model development, experiment design, interpretation and evaluation of the numerical calculations. The group designs, performs and analyzes global ocean/sea-ice simulations, from low to high-resolution, based on the NEMO (Nucleus for European Modelling of the Ocean) platform. A substantial fraction of the group’s efforts goes in developing and maintaining the NEMO-OPA Ocean General Circulation Model, through an active role in the NEMO System Team.
In 2014, to realistically reproduce the effect of mesoscale features on the large-scale ocean circulation, we tackled the challenge of simulating an eddying ocean configuration with a horizontal resolution of 1/16° at the equator, currently the highest resolution implemented in a global NEMO domain.
The group follows the development of sea ice models and it is actively involved in testing and evaluating the Louvain-la-Neuve Sea Ice Models (LIM), in collaboration with international institutions.
This group prepares the ocean components for the data assimilation system and the Earth system model, and strongly collaborates with other groups at CMCC.