Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Assessing The Skill Of The Improved Treatment Of Riverine Freshwater In The Community Earth System Model Relative To A New Salinity Climatology, Qiang Sun, Michael M. Whitney, Frank O. Bryan, Yu-Heng Tseng

Department of Marine Sciences

Recent studies have explored the sensitivity of global ocean model simulations to the treatment of riverine freshwater and the representation of estuarine processes via an estuary box model (EBM) applied within CESM. This study builds on these efforts by assessing the model skill score relative to a new salinity climatology. The new climatology averages the original observational data of the World Ocean Database directly onto the CESM ocean-component tracer-grid cells without spatial interpolation, smoothing, or other gap-filling techniques to mitigate coastal ocean salinity bias present in the World Ocean Atlas. The mean squared error (MSE) for coastal upper ocean salinity …