Accelerated simulation of passive tracers in ocean circulation models

A novel strategy is proposed for the efficient simulation of geochemical tracers in ocean models. The method captures the tracer advection and diffusion in a general circulation model (GCM) without any alteration (or even knowledge) of the GCM code. In comparison with offline tracer models, the proposed method is considerably more efficient and automatically includes all parameterizations of unresolved processes present in the most sophisticated GCMs. A comparison with a global configuration of the MIT GCM shows that the scheme can capture the complex three-dimensional transport of a state-of-the-art GCM. A key advantage of the proposed technique is the ability to directly compute steady-state solutions, a facility particularly well-suited to tracers such as natural radiocarbon. This capability is applied to develop a novel algorithm for accelerating the dynamical adjustment of ocean models. © 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.