Is ana_btflux an alternative to ROMS bottom heat trapping?

[aryansafaie]

Dear all,

If I understand correctly, the default setup for ROMS traps all heat flux arriving at the bottom cells in those cells. Would defining a bottom flux in ana_btflux make the model behave differently? For example, if I wanted 50 degC m/s to pass through those bottom cells, is that what I would enter in ana_btflux?
I am not particularly concerned with heat conservation at this moment.

Thank you for your assistance.
Best,
-aryan

[kate]

If you knew you had an extra 50 W/m^2 arriving from above, you could set your bottom heat flux to (I believe) -50 W/m^2 to get rid of it.

A better fix might be to prevent all that heat from getting to the bottom. A quick-and-dirty fix we use is to set the light penetration to be a function of water depth. The real world uses light attenuation from sediment and biota so that shallow coastal waters absorb all that light right at the surface. Raphael Dussin has spent a lot of time getting a light limitation scheme from COBALT (a BGC model) into ROMS - but not the trunk ROMS.

[aryansafaie]

Thank you Kate.

Yes, I'm also exploring/manipulating the exponential decay of solar radiation with depth. So many interesting options!

Best,
-aryan