Numerical study on spatially varying bottom friction coefficient of a 2D tidal model with adjoint method

Based on the simulation of M2 tide in the Bohai Sea, the Yellow Sea and the East China Sea, TOPEX/Poseidon altimeter data are assimilated into a 2D tidal model to study the spatially varying bottom friction coefficient (BFC) by using the adjoint method. In this study, the BFC at some grid points are selected as the independent BFC, while the BFC at other grid points can be obtained through linear interpolation with the independent BFC. Two strategies for selecting the independent BFC are discussed. In the first strategy, one independent BFC is uniformly selected from each 1°×1° area. In the second one, the independent BFC are selected based on the spatial distribution of water depth. Twin and practical experiments are carried out to compare the two strategies. In the twin experiments, the adjoint method has a strong ability of inverting the prescribed BFC distributions combined with the spatially varying BFC. In the practical experiments, reasonable simulation results can be obtained by optimizing the spatially varying independent BFC. In both twin and practical experiments, the simulation results with the second strategy are better than those with the first one. The BFC distribution obtained from the practical experiment indicates that the BFC in shallow water are larger than those in deep water in the Bohai Sea, the North Yellow Sea, the South Yellow Sea and the East China Sea individually. However, the BFC in the East China Sea are larger than those in the other areas perhaps because of the large difference of water depth or bottom roughness. The sensitivity analysis indicates that the model results are more sensitive to the independent BFC near the land.