Toward a high-resolution coupled ocean-sea ice model

This paper reports on the implementation of a novel numerical code of a coupled ocean-ice model using an existing ocean code and a revised sea-ice code. The numerical coupling is afforded by the OASIS coupler (CERFACS). All data exchange between the sub-models is strictly limited to the coupler. The coupler represents high-level processes with the sub-models being executed as directed by the coupler. Details of the model physics, their numerical implementation and setup as well as information on the coupling strategy are presented here. Initial tests on the sub-models and the coupler configuration showed that both the ocean and the sea-ice model codes scale well with increasing number of CPUs. We also show that the overhead due to the explicit numerical coupler are small compared to the overall compute requirements of the sub-models.