New Zealand Journal of Marine and Freshwater Research abstracts

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A hydrodynamic model of Chatham Rise, New Zealand

Mark G. Hadfield
Graham J. Rickard
Michael J. Uddstrom

National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research Limited
Private Bag 14 901
Wellington, New Zealand

Abstract A three-dimensional hydrodynamic ocean model, the Regional Ocean Modelling System (ROMS), was applied to a region encompassing the Chatham Rise, New Zealand and forced by surface fluxes from an atmospheric reanalysis data set. The model outputs fields were validated against a number of observation-based data sets, including the CSIRO Atlas of Regional Seas 2000 (CARS 2000) climatology of sub-surface temperature and salinity, a sea surface temperature (SST) climatology from the NIWA SST Archive (NSA), and sea surface height (SSH) from the Archiving, Validation and Interpretation of Satellite data in Oceanography (AVISO) Mapped Sea Level Anomalies (MSLA) data set. The model reproduced the flow around Chatham Rise well and had a realistic seasonal cycle in the upper ocean. Its biggest deficiency was that the Wairarapa Eddy was too steady and pushed warm water too far south towards the head of Hikurangi Trough. This exercise confirms the need to validate a model against multiple data sets and shows the value of SST data for revealing underlying oceanographic features.

Keywords sea surface temperature; surface currents; Subtropical Front

New Zealand Journal of Marine and Freshwater Research, 2007, Vol. 41: 239–264
0028–8330/07/4102–0239 © The Royal Society of New Zealand 2007
M06028; Online publication date 13 June 2007. Received 14 June 2006; accepted 30 January 2007

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