[MITgcm-support] Eta calculation on different grid sizes

[Hadar Berman]

Hi everyone,

I am trying to reduce the resolution of my model. As a first step I only cut the domain to a part of it, so that I now have two running models - (1) the full domain model and (2) only the northern part of the domain. Both models use the same grid size and the bathymetry, initial conditions, surface forcing are exactly the same. The only difference is that the full domain model now drives the boundary of the northern domain one.
Running these two models for only a few time steps, I expected to have small differences close to the boundary, but not in the interior. Instead, I can see small differences between the new model and the old one in the temperature, velocities etc after only one time step in the entire water column. I started to look into the code to check what causes this, and found that EtaN in solve_for_pressure.F and cg2d.F is computed using the global maximum of the RHS (rhsMax) (I probably should have mentioned that it is a linear free surface hydrostatic model in both cases).

I was wandering, first - can this be the case, that eta changes as a function of the domain I choose, and if so, why? second - is there a flag to use so that eta calculations would not be affected by the size of the domain I choose?

Thanks,
Hadar.