Geology

Meteorology

Rossby radius of deformation

Rossby wave

Atmospheric sciences

Computer science

RADIUS

Turbulence

Computer security

Rossby number

Physics

Journal of Advances in Modeling Earth Systems

We discuss the performance of the Finite Element Ocean Model (FESOM) on locally eddy‐resolving global unstructured meshes. In particular, the utility of the mesh design approach whereby mesh horizontal resolution is varied as half the Rossby radius in most of the model domain is explored. Model simulations on such a mesh (FESOM‐XR) are compared with FESOM simulations on a smaller‐size mesh, where refinement depends only on the pattern of observed variability (FESOM‐HR). We also compare FESOM results to a simulation of the ocean model of the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology (MPIOM) on a tripolar regular grid with refinement toward the poles, which uses a number of degrees of freedom similar to FESOM‐XR. The mesh design strategy, which relies on the Rossby radius and/or the observed variability pattern, tends to coarsen the resolution in tropical and partly subtropical latitudes compared to the regular MPIOM grid. Excessive variations of mesh resolution are found to affect the performance in other nearby ar...

Ocean Modeling on a Mesh With Resolution Following the Local Rossby Radius