Volume Budgets

This page outlines the pertinent files and methodology to compute a volume budget using output from an MITgcm model.

Required Fields

The following fields are required for the heat budget:

Field	Variable Name	Units
Zonal mass-weighted component of velocity	UVELMASS	m/s
Meridional mass-weighted component of velocity	VVELMASS	m/s
Net surface freshwater flux	oceFWflx	kg/m\(^2\)/s

Suggested Diagnostics Organization

The following entries to the data.diagnostics file would yield the terms above.

#---
fields(1:3,1) = 'UVELMASS','VVELMASS','oceFWflx',
frequency(1)  = 86400.0,
filename(1)   = 'diags/vol_flux/vol_flux',

Note

WVELMASS is not required to close the budget since the surface velocity is proportional to oceFWflx. In other words, if WVELMASS is depth-integrated from k=Nr to k=1 it will cancel out to zero.