The ICON-Ocean model is driven by climatological atmospheric fluxes of momentum, heat and freshwater using forcing data from the Ocean Model Intercomparison Project. The forcing changes daily and is repeated after one year. The model has a globally uniform and "eddy-permitting" horizontal resolution of 20km and consists of 64 vertical levels. Removal of land points resulted in a grid consisting of ∼ 60 million grid cells. The time step is 15 minutes, the model parameters, such as bi-harmonic viscosity and diffusivity, were chosen within the typical range of values that can be found in the literature. The ICON-Ocean model was spun-up for 200 years and statistics of the model output were calculated over the last 20 years.
Figure1: Global flow visualization in 100m depth, illustrating several eddy-rich areas around the world.
The video shows the horizontal flow speed at 100m depth in logarithmic scale using a spherical projection. Among the most prominent features are the western boundary currents, instability waves in the tropical pacific and the Agulhas rings at the southern tip of Africa.