About GOTM

General Ocean Turbulence Model (GOTM) is an ambitious name for a one-dimensional water column model for marine and limnological applications. It is coupled to a choice of traditional as well as state-of-the-art parameterisations for vertical turbulent mixing. The package consists of the FORTRAN90 software, a number of idealised and realistic test cases, and a scientific documentation, all published under the GNU public license. GOTM is, of course, not complete (and will never be). Whoever is missing any feature in GOTM, is warmly invited to contribute to GOTM and add her or his personal preferences or needs.

The idea behind GOTM is to provide a simple and well-documented tool that can be used to

• learn about the physics and numerical treatment of vertical mixing processes in natural waters by using a suite of prepared test cases,
• compare the performances of various turbulence schemes in different oceanic regimes (or compare them to known analytical solutions),
• integrate your own oceanic data into GOTM, and simulate numerically the water column processes under investigation,
• easily introduce new turbulence parameterisations into GOTM's modular structure,
• couple GOTM with new modules like air-sea interaction models, biological models, ice models, ... and investigate their behaviour in idealised or realistic test cases,
• and couple GOTM to your 3-D circulation model via a purpose-built interface that is applicable to all structured vertical z-level and topography-following grids (a number of 3-D models are already supported).

If you plan an extension to GOTM for your own research project, please contact us before you start. It occured a number of times in the past that different groups started working on very similar projects without knowing from each other - which is exactly against the spirit of the GOTM project.