Software development of the TaIwan Multi-scale Community Ocean Model (TIMCOM)

The recently developed TaIwan Multi-scale Community Ocean Model (referred as TIMCOM), evolving from the DieCAST (Dietrich Center for Air Sea Technology) model, provides an accurate, efficient, and user-friendly framework to study a broad spectrum of oceanic flows, ranging from bays and coastal to global oceans. The model employs the finite volume concept and discretizes the primitive equations using the modified leapfrog scheme and fourth-order spatial approximation. The pressure Poisson equation is efficiently solved by the error vector propagation (EVP) method. Adaptive grid-coupling technique is further adopted to provide the required resolution for the targeted region without excessive computation. Besides, a user-friendly interface is introduced to simplify user customization. Two practical applications, global and dual-grid North Pacific Ocean modeling frameworks which are used to simulate the global and regional ocean-climate variability, clearly show the robustness, efficiency, and accuracy of the TIMCOM software.