Several coastal ocean models have been used to compute the circulation on the Northwest European Continental Shelf. Five of them, developed within the European Union, are compared in the scope of an idealised three-dimensional test case, dealing with the geostrophic adjustment of a freshwater cylinder. As the central eddy adjusts, unstable baroclinic vortices start to grow. All the models are able to produce such unstable vortices. However, two of them produce an order-two instability, which is in accordance with a previous laboratory experiment, while the others exhibit an order-four instability. Using a simple scaling analysis, it is seen that the azimuthal wavenumber depends on the ratio of the kinetic energy to the available potential energy. It appears that the discrepancy in the azimuthal wavenumber is mainly due to the effect of the discretisation of the horizontal advection of momentum which could produce significant decrease of the total kinetic energy.