A CONSISTENT BAROCLINIC QUASI-GEOSTROPHIC OCEAN MODEL IN MULTIPLY CONNECTED OCEAN DOMAINS

The Harvard ocean baroclinic quasigeostrophic model is further extended to enable the treatment of multiply connected domains with arbitrary coastal boundary geometry. A set of sufficient quasigeostrophic boundary conditions at physical boundaries are determined by requiring consistency with a regular asymptotic expansion in the Rossby number of thc primitive equations. To take advantage of fast Helmholtz solvers in regular domains, the physical multiply connected domain is embedded in a regular grid, and boundary conditions are imposed by using a variation of the capacitance matrix method. The accuracy of the method is exhibited by comparison with exact solutions.