Evaluation of Analytical Turbulence Closures for Quasi-Geostrophic Ocean Flows with Coastal Boundaries

TL;DR

This paper evaluates different analytical turbulence closure models within quasi-geostrophic ocean flow simulations that include complex coastal boundaries, highlighting their performance and differences in phase and feature reconstruction.

Contribution

It extends pseudo-spectral QG numerical schemes with GPU acceleration and assesses four SGS closures in realistic coastal flow scenarios.

Findings

Differences in closure performance regarding phase accuracy.

Dynamic closures better capture flow features near boundaries.

Coastal boundaries influence SGS closure effectiveness.

Abstract

Numerical turbulence simulations typically involve parameterizations such as Large Eddy Simulations (LES). Applications to geophysical flows, especially ocean flows, are further complicated by the presence of complex topography and interior landforms such as coastlines, islands, and capes. In this work, we extend pseudo-spectral quasi-geostrophic (QG) numerical schemes and GPU-based solvers to simulate flows with coastal boundaries using the Brinkman volume penalization approach. We incorporate sponging and a splitting scheme to handle inflow and aperiodic boundary conditions. We evaluate four analytical sub-grid-scale (SGS) closures based on the eddy viscosity hypothesis: the standard Smagorinsky and Leith closures, and their dynamic variants. We show applications to QG flows past circular islands and capes with the beta-plane approximation. We perform both a priori analysis of the SGS closure terms as well as a posteriori assessment of the SGS terms and simulated vorticity fields. Our results showcase differences between the various closures, especially their approach to phase and feature reconstruction errors in the presence of coastal boundaries.