neutralocean documentation

neutralocean is a Python library to calculate oceanic neutral surfaces and related things.

The major task of this software is to calculate omega surfaces, following the algorithm of Stanley et al. (2021). Omega surfaces are highly accurate approximately neutral surfaces that work by iteratively reducing the neutrality error.

There are also routines to calculate potential density surfaces, specific volume anomaly surfaces, neutral trajectories, the Veronis density label, and measures of neutrality error.

Topobaric surfaces (Stanley, 2019a) and their modified form (Stanley 2019b) are the most accurate approximately neutral surfaces that posses an exact geostrophic streamfunction (furnishing an Ertel potential vorticity with no baroclinic production term). Software to compute topobaric surfaces is significantly more complicated and is currently only available in the original MATLAB neutral-surfaces toolbox.

How to cite? If you use this software, the most appropriate paper to cite is Stanley et al. (2021).

Note

This documentation is under development. If you want further documentation on a particular feature, please email me.

Contents

Indices and tables

References

Klocker, McDougall, Jackett 2009, A new method of forming approximately neutral surfaces, Ocean Science, 5, 155-172.

Stanley, G.J., 2019a. Neutral surface topology. Ocean Modelling 138, 88–106. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ocemod.2019.01.008

Stanley, G.J., 2019b. The exact geostrophic streamfunction for neutral surfaces. Ocean Modelling 138, 107–121. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ocemod.2019.04.002

Stanley, McDougall, Barker 2021, Algorithmic improvements to finding approximately neutral surfaces, Journal of Advances in Earth System Modelling, 13(5).