Ocean Current and Climate Modeling?

[bcforme]

I'm a stickler for scientific detail. Tectonic plates, volcanism, mountain formation, erosion and deposition, the works. If it's in a geology book, I'll try to use it. Here's the problem: two of my continents run longitudinally, not up and down. Being the anal retentive person I am, this has me in quite a predicament. I have no clue how to model the ocean currents there. Silly, I know.

Does anyone know of any software that lets you plop down some continents and displays currents?

[waldronate]

For truly longitudinal continents I would expect that the currents would continue to flow around as with the Antarctic circumpolar current. Depending on how large the continents are in vertical extent then I might expect to see something like what happens on the northern side of the Indian Ocean.

http://www.eeb.ucla.edu/test/faculty...eanography.htm and http://www.sonoma.edu/users/f/freide...lec2images.htm are reasonably good introductions to the subject of physical oceanography if you're having problems in that area.

I don't know of a good physically-based oceanic/atmospheric heat transport model, unfortunately.

[bcforme]

Well, the southern continent is like a parallelogram stretching from 15 degrees to around 75 degrees. The northern continent is much longer, kind of like slapping Africa and S. America end to end and rotating it 90 degrees. Thanks for the links. Hopefully, I'll be able to work through it now.

[jwbjerk]

Yeah, besides the circumpolar current look at the pacific.

Surface currents pretty much go straight east or straight west unless there is land to deflect them.