  This work involves theoretical and numerical analysis of the Thermal
Quasi-Geostrophic (TQG) model of submesoscale geophysical fluid dynamics (GFD).
Physically, the TQG model involves thermal geostrophic balance, in which the
Rossby number, the Froude number and the stratification parameter are all of
the same asymptotic order. The main analytical contribution of this paper is to
construct local-in-time unique strong solutions for the TQG model. For this, we
show that solutions of its regularized version $\alpha$-TQG converge to
solutions of TQG as its smoothing parameter $\alpha \rightarrow 0$ and we
obtain blowup criteria for the $\alpha$-TQG model. The main contribution of the
computational analysis is to verify the rate of convergence of $\alpha$-TQG
solutions to TQG solutions as $\alpha \rightarrow 0$ for example simulations in
appropriate GFD regimes.
