The Baseline Evaluation of LASG/IAP Climate System Ocean Model (LICOM) Version 2

The baseline performance of the latest version (version 2) of an intermediate resolution, stand-alone climate oceanic general circulation model, called LASG/IAP (State Key Laboratory of Numerical Modeling for Atmospheric Sciences and Geophysical Fluid Dynamics/Institute of Atmospheric Physics) Climate system Ocean Model (LICOM), has been evaluated against the observation by using the main metrics from Griffies et al. in 2009. In general, the errors of LICOM2 in the water properties and in the circulation are comparable with the models of Coordinated Ocean-ice Reference Experiments (COREs). Some common biases are still evident in the present version, such as the cold bias in the eastern Pacific cold tongue, the warm biases off the east coast of the basins, the weak poleward heat transport in the Atlantic, and the relatively large biases in the Arctic Ocean. A unique systematic bias occurs in LICOM2 over the Southern Ocean, compared with CORE models. It seems that this bias may be related to the sea ice process around the Antarctic continent.