Does Oceananigans support coastal modelling?

[stanleesocca]

Hi devs. This is not an issue but more of comment. I will immediately close this after some feedbacks.

I was wondering if Oceananigans in its current form has support for coastal or regional modelling? I ask because my impression is that Oceananigans follows similar paradigm as MITgcm with the latter seemingly used in regional ocean modelling. Are there plans to use the model for such setup? What will it takes for the community to get to such level?

Thanks.

[simone-silvestri]

Hello @stanleesocca,

at the moment Oceananigans can be used for regional modeling with some hacks, but we have plans to make the whole process more streamlined.
In particular, we are planning to implement a utility that allows easy handling of time-dependent boundary conditions and inlets/outlets, and we still need to implement an easy way to deal with atmosphere-ocean interaction through bulk formulae.
In addition, we still do not support tidal parameterization or wetting/drying which might be required for regional modeling.

What setup were you thinking to implement?

[glwagner]

Correct -- we only support z grid right now. However, bathymetry and surface boundary conditions can be as complex as you like.

[stanleesocca]

Cool. Aside the surface boundary condition. From the docs, it isn't clear to me how one can include a bathymetry grid file. Any pointer?

[glwagner]

For simulations in complex domains, we use ImmersedBoundaryGrid. You're right that it isn't documented --- that should be fixed.

Here is an example script that uses ImmersedBoundaryGrid. That same directly has a few more. Perhaps @simone-silvestri has more suggestions:

https://github.com/CliMA/Oceananigans.jl/blob/main/validation/immersed_boundaries/bumpy_baroclinic_adjustment.jl

[stanleesocca]

Thanks @glwagner. Really appreciate. I will take a look and get back to you if I run into any trouble.

[glwagner]

This PR is also adding an example (I forgot about this):

#3132

motivation to merge that sooner.