E11.6 MPAS-Analysis: a Package for Evaluating MPAS Simulations

Abstract

The MPAS-Analysis package is the first diagnostics package that evaluates MPAS simulations by direct comparison with available observations. It is almost entirely python based and features a shared code structure, so that main tasks such as interpolation from unstructured to regular grid, computation of climatologies, etc., are part of shared routines used by different diagnostic tasks. At the moment, MPAS-Analysis provides two types of diagnostics: 1) large scale metrics important for the evaluation of the coupled climate system, such as climatologies and trends of Sea Surface Temperature (SST), trends of Ocean Heat Content (OHC), Meridional Overturning Circulation (MOC), and climatologies and trends of sea-ice coverage for both hemispheres; 2) metrics important for the evaluation of the Southern Ocean and cryosphere around Antarctica, such as Mixed Layer Depth (MLD) maps and T, S distribution both in the horizontal and vertical direction compared with Southern Ocean State Estimate (SOSE) and World Ocean Circulation Experiment (WOCE) oceanic transect data, as well as melt rates underneath ice shelves compared with recent observations. The resulting diagnostic figures are viewable through an easy-to-browse web interface. Recent development has also provided interfacing with the Cinema software (cinemascience.org), which allows for a more dynamic platform for scientists to explore MPAS simulations in depth.