DRAKKAR  Multi-scale Ocean modelling project

The DRAKKAR project is motivated by open questions related to the variability of the circulation and water mass properties during the past and future decades, and its effects on climate through the transport of heat and the uptake of atmospheric anthropogenic CO2. Our regions of interest are primarily the Atlantic Ocean and the Nordic Seas, and the southern ocean.To understand and predict global changes in the atmosphere-ocean-ice system, the carbon cycle, and marine ecosystems, and also to improve the outcomes of operational oceanography, require numerical ocean/sea-ice circulation models capable of realistically representing the physical ocean processes relevant to these multidisciplinary applications. To achieve the best possible scientific results, these model simulations require a wide spectrum of competence and important computational resources, which can be best found within a co-ordinated effort. The project proposes to join the efforts of several research teams in France, Germany, Russia and the U.K to carry on a community modelling effort which will implement and manage a hierarchy of ocean model configurations, from which it will carry out co-ordinated realistic simulations of the ocean circulation at regional and global scales, at resolutions high enough to insure dynamical consistency over a wide range of resolved scales (from eddy to global, from day to decade).