Review and perspectives of study on thermohaline circulation

The intensity variation of the ocean general circulation has great influence on the regional and global climate.In the past fifties years,with the great improvement of the domestic and international global ocean general circulation model(OGCM) and the offshore and regional ocean circulation model,the distribution of the sea-surface temperature,the sea-surface height and the ocean current as well as the evolution of El Nino and La Nina could be simulated well.However,the numerical model is not perfect yet for the shortage of the observational data.Some researches were based on the non-Boussinesq models in pressure coordinates.Given the open boundary of the ocean model with the composition of the tidal current and the residual current,the water balance of passing in and out in the whole calculation region can be realized.Efforts should be made to supersede the rigid-lid model with the free-surface model,to develop the air-sea coupled model in virtue of the oceanic data assimilation system,and to improve the design of the dynamical frame and different projects.These efforts are significant to improve the simulative capacity of the ocean model.