Comment on “Climate Drift in a Global Ocean General Circulation Model”

Abstract

In a recent study it was found that the GFDL modular ocean model showed a small drift and very little variability when stochastically forced under mixed boundary conditions. This is in contrast to earlier studies that found very strong variability in a similar experiment with the Hamburg LSG ocean model. A number of possible reasons for such contrasting results, one of which is that the behavior of the two models is fundamentally different, have been discussed. In this comment, it is suggested that the main reason may be that the magnitude of the noise forcing used in the GFDL model was lower than that used in the Hamburg model.