Simulating hydrostatic and non-hydrostatic oceanic flows
The thin aspect ratio of oceanic basins is simultaneously a complication to contend with when developing ocean models and all opportunity 10 simplify the equations of motion. Here We discuss these two aspects of this geometric feature in the context of hydrostatic and non-hydrostatic ocean models. A simple analysis shows that the horizontal Viscous operator in the hydrostatic primitive equations plays a central role in the specification of boundary conditions oil the lateral vertical surfaces bounding the domain. The asymptotic analysis shows that for very thin aspect ratios the leading-order flow cannot he closed unless additional terms in the equations are considered. namely either the horizontal viscous forces or the non-hydrostatic pressure forces. In either case, narrow boundary layers must be resolved in order to close the circulation properly. The computational cost increases Substantially when non-hydrostatic effects arc taken into account. Copyright (C) 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
hydrostatic navier-stokes spectral element permissible boundary conditions