[MITgcm-devel] conservative temperature

[Martin Losch]

Hi Jean-Michel,
as soon as you use eosType = 'TEOS10', "theta" and "salt" should be interpreted as conservative temperature and absolute salinity. When you do not use TEOS10, then the eos expects potential temperature and the terminology of conservative temperature is confusion if not inconsistent.

In practice the differences will be small enough to not worry about them (e.g. changing from non-factorized to factorized versions of the EOS will probably have a bigger effect).

Martin

On Jan 22, 2012, at 9:31 PM, Jean-Michel Campin wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> I had a quick look at the TEOS document (2010 Thermodynamics
> Equation of Seawater), and seems that the temperature
> we have in MITgcm, that is called potential temperature,
> should be renamed to "Conservative Temperature":
> As I understand, if Cp was strictly constant it would be the same, 
> but for seawater Cp varies a little bit with salinity (and with
> pressure, but does this one contribute ?).
> And since MITgcm assumes a constant Cp, the "Conservative Temperature"
> (= big THETA = Potential_Enthalpy / Cp0, with Cp0 = constant)
> seems to fit better with the MITgcm temperature.
> Now, it's likely that it does not make big differences
> (and probably much less that Boussinesq related assumption).
> And what about the various EOS we have (potential temp or
> conservative temp) ?
> 
> Cheers,
> Jean-Michel
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> MITgcm-devel mailing list
> MITgcm-devel at mitgcm.org
> http://mitgcm.org/mailman/listinfo/mitgcm-devel