A community paper evaluating the performance of ACCESS-OM2 has been submitted to Geoscientific Model Development (GMD). The paper has 30 authors from across the Australian community. GMD has an open review process, so you can track its progress.
This paper outlines the performance of ACCESS-OM2 at three different model resolutions, as indicated in the figure below. It aims to spell out which versions of the model are suitable for different types of studies, and highlights the performance of the 0.1° resolution configuration (referred to as ACCESS-OM2-01). The paper shows that ACCESS-OM2 does a good job of representing many features of the ocean. Historical sea ice extent trends are well-represented, and the surface properties and transects in each ocean basin compare well with the observational record. The large scale overturning circulation, flow through the Indonesian archipelago and patterns of boundary currents are realistic, supporting the notion that this suite of models is competitive with similar models from other institutions. Areas for improvement include the relatively weak barotropic transport in the midlatitude gyres, particularly in the Pacific Ocean, the weaker than observed Drake Passage transport and the weak AMOC in the 1° configuration. For full details, feel free to browse the paper!
Kiss, A. E., Hogg, A. McC., Hannah, N., Boeira Dias, F., Brassington, G. B., Chamberlain, M. A., Chapman, C., Dobrohotoff, P., Domingues, C. M., Duran, E. R., England, M. H., Fiedler, R., Griffies, S. M., Heerdegen, A., Heil, P., Holmes, R. M., Klocker, A., Marsland, S. J., Morrison, A. K., Munroe, J., Oke, P. R., Nikurashin, M., Pilo, G. S., Richet, O., Savita, A., Spence, P., Stewart, K. D., Ward, M. L., Wu, F., and Zhang, X.: ACCESS-OM2: A Global Ocean-Sea Ice Model at Three Resolutions, Geosci. Model Dev. Discuss., https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-2019-106, in review, 2019.