Development of a parallel ocean general circulation model on the cubic grid

Publisher Summary This chapter discusses the development of a parallel ocean general circulation model (OGCM) on the cubic grid. The OGCM on the cubic grid is being developed to avoid the difficulty of the severe time step constraint of the longitude–latitude grid, which is widely used in current global ocean models. The grid-size dependence of the time step length of the cubic grid was tested by the shallow water model and showed good agreement with the analytical estimation. It was confirmed that the cubic grid ocean model could employ longer time steps than that in the longitude–latitude grid model. The cubic grid model was parallelized with 2D domain decomposition. The multiple-grid-width halo was taken to reduce the communication frequency and improve the computational efficiency. The development of the cubic grid OGCM still continues. Parameterizations used in other OGCMs are implemented to the cubic grid model, and the high-resolution models are constructed.