GOTM

About GOTM

Welcome to the General Ocean Turbulence Model (GOTM), which is a one-dimensional water column model for studying hydrodynamic and biogeochemical processes in marine and limnic waters. GOTM is published under the GNU Public Licence and can be freely used.

The heart of GOTM is a library of traditional and state-of-the-art turbulence closure models for the parameterisation of vertical turbulent fluxes of momentum, heat and dissolved and particulate matter (Umlauf and Burchard, 2005). This turbulence module has been linked to, or recoded for, a number of ocean models such as ROMS, FVCOM, SELFE, FESOM, GETM and NEMO in order to parameterize turbulent exchange.

Typically, GOTM is used as a stand-alone model for studying dynamics of boundary layers in natural waters, where lateral gradients can either be neglected or prescribed. Frequent hydrodynamic applications are investigations of air-sea fluxes, surface mixed-layer dynamics, stratification processes in shelf seas, dynamics of bottom boundary layers with or without sediment transport, estuarine and coastal dynamics, and many more. To link biogeochemical or sediment modules to GOTM, the Framework for Aquatic Biogeochemical Models (FABM) (Bruggeman and Bolding, 2014) is used, which is also available for several 3D models.

The GOTM developers encourage all users to subscribe to the GOTM Users email list to interact with all other users, to report about planned applications, to announce new results, and to discuss possible extensions. Users wanting to participate in development can apply for access to the developers mailing list here.