FESOM 2. Circumpolar Simulation (1991-2020) /TS

Here we provide the monthly mean potential temperature and salinity results from 1991 to 2020 south of 60°S.

The mesh used  was generated using the FESOM Mesh Generator (fmesh - https://github.com/FESOM/fmesh) modified to include the ice shelf cavities. The global mesh contains 1,261,056 triangles (elements) formed by 648,389 vertices (nodes). ~36% of those are located south of 60 °S where the resolution (square root of element area) varies between 39.3 and 2.2 km with higher resolution in the ice shelf cavities and on the continental shelves and lowest resolution in areas with greater depth and few bathymetric features (Fig. 2). The bathymetry and ice shelf draft are derived from RTopo-2 (Schaffer et al., 2016). The vertical discretization was made with 148 horizontal  “z” levels. The layer thickness is smaller near the surface and is kept constant or slightly increased with depth, the layer below has a maximum thickness increase of 10 %, for example if the layer on top is 20 m  thick the layer below would be equal or  22 m thick.

The ocean initial temperature and salinity are from the “Global Ocean Hydrography with a High Quality Arctic Ocean Version 3.0” (Steele et al, 2001), a climatology derived from the 1998 version of the World Ocean Atlas (Antonov et al. 1998, Boyer et al. 1998). All the initial velocities are 0. The atmospheric forcing for the model is obtained from the Japanese 55-year Reanalysis, or JRA-55 (Kobayashi et al. 2015, Harada et al. 2016). The simulation starts in 1958 and goes until 2020 with 2-minute time steps; the outputs are provided as monthly means.