Impact of the representation of waves on simulated particle dispersal in the surface ocean

The knowledge of how seawater moves around in the global ocean and transports tracers and particulates, is crucial for solving many outstanding issues in physical oceanography and climate science. Due to limited available observations, seawater pathways are often estimated by evaluating virtual particle trajectories inferred from velocity fields computed with ocean models. The quality of these Lagrangian analyses strongly depends on how well the underlying ocean model represents the ocean circulation features of interest.
Here, we investigate how simulated surface particle dispersal changes, if the – often omitted or only approximated – impact of surface waves is considered. Specifically, we test the impact of new representations of wave-current interactions for the ocean model NEMO in a case study for the Mediterranean Sea. We are using velocity output from a high-resolution (1/24°) ocean-only model simulation as well as a complementary coupled ocean-wave model simulation, to answer the following questions: How do waves impact the simulated surface particle dispersal, and what is the relative impact of Stokes drift and wave-driven Eulerian currents? How well can the wave impact be approximated by the superposition of Eulerian mean and Stokes drift velocity fields obtained from independently run ocean and wave models?
We find that the wave coupling leads to a decrease in the mean surface current speed in summer dominated by wave-driven Eulerian currents, and an increase in the mean surface current speed in winter dominated by Stokes drift. We further show that Lagrangian simulations with superimposed Eulerian currents and Stokes drift from independent ocean-only and wave models do not necessarily yield more realistic results for surface dispersal patterns than simulations that do not include any wave effect. This implies that – whenever possible – velocity fields from a coupled ocean-wave model should be used for surface particle dispersal simulations.