Application of the Improved Vertical Mixing Scheme to the Modeling of the Japan Sea Under Traveling Typhoons

摘要

The surface mixed layer in response to two different mixed layer schemes in the Japan Sea under traveling typhoon is investigated using a high-resolution ocean circulation model. The simulated sea surface temperature in the original Mellor-Yamada (1982) mixed layer scheme model is obviously warmer than observation data. It agrees with the viewpoint of previous studies implying that the intensity of the turbulent mixing is underestimated in the Mellor-Yamada scheme. On the other hand, the improved Mellor-Yamada turbulence closure scheme, which proposed by Nakanishi and Niino (2009), provides improved sea surface temperature. Furthermore, the correlation between the model vertical temperature profile and the Argo Profiling Float data is relatively higher. This study concludes that the improved mixed layer scheme contributes to a certain extent to overcome the shortcomings of the original Mellor-Yamada scheme, namely, insufficient growth of the mixed layer and underestimates of the turbulent kinetic energy, showing a better performance compared with the original Mellor-Yamada scheme in modeling the ocean mixed layer.