Surface-Restoring Forcing Data

Restoring of surface salinity is carried out during the coordinated-spinup (Expt. #2) and coordinated-analysis experiments (Expt. #3); there is no restoring of surface temperature. The following strategy has been adopted in an effort to minimize the impact of surface-salinity restoring on the experiments.

During the first eleven years of the integration (i.e., Jan 1948 - Dec 1958) surface restoring is applied everywhere on the ocean surface using a restoring time-scale of 180 days. During the remaining years (i.e., 1959 - forward) there is no restoring of surface salinity. The restoring is performed using an annually averaged climatology of surface salinity from the Polar Science Center Hydrographic Climatology (PHC) atlas.

As an exception to this rule, global-domain models may continue to perform surface restoring of salinity after January 1959, but only in that part of their domains south of 60ºN.

Restoring is also applied along the lateral boundaries of the regional AOMIP domains. The detailed specification on that restoring is the free-choice of the individual AOMIP modeling groups.