Edward W. Blockley

Forecasting the ocean state using NEMO:The new FOAM system

The Forecasting Ocean Assimilation Model (FOAM) deep ocean analysis and forecasting system has been running operationally at the Met Office for over 10 years.The system has recently been transitioned to use the Nucleus for European Modelling of the Ocean (NEMO) community model as its core ocean component. This paper gives an end-to-end description of the FOAM-NEMO operational system and presents some preliminary assessment of operational and hindcast integrations including verification statistics against observations and forecast verification against model best guess fields.Validation of the sea surface height fields is presented, which suggests that the system captures and tracks the major mesoscale features of the ocean circulation reasonably well, with some evidence of improvement in higher-resolution configurations.

Recent progress in performance evaluations and near real-time assessment of operational ocean products

Operational ocean forecast systems provide routine marine products to an ever-widening community of users and stakeholders. The majority of users need information about the quality and reliability of the products to exploit them fully. Hence, forecast centres have been developing improved methods for evaluating and communicating the quality of their products. Global Ocean Data Assimilation Experiment (GODAE) OceanView, along with the Copernicus European Marine Core Service and other national and international programmes, has facilitated the development of coordinated validation activities among these centres. New metrics, assessing a wider range of ocean parameters, have been defined and implemented in real-time. An overview of recent progress and emerging international standards is presented here.

A multiple length scale correlation operator for ocean data assimilation

Ocean data assimilation systems can take into account time and space scale variations by representing background error covariance functions with more complex shapes than the classical Gaussian function. In particular, the construction of the correlation functions can be improved to give more flexibility. We describe a correlation operator that features high correlations within a short scale and weak correlations within a larger scale. This multiple length scale correlation operator is defined as a linear combination of Whittle–Matérn functions with different length scales. The main characteristics of the resulting correlation function are described. In particular, a focus is given on features that might be of interest to determine the parameters of the model: the Daley length scale, the normalised spectrum inflexion point and the kurtosis coefficient. The multiple length scale operator has been implemented in NEMOVAR, a variational ocean data assimilation system. A dual length scale formulation was tested in a one-year reanalysis and compared with a single length scale formulation. The results emphasise the importance of estimating with great care the factors used within the combination. They also demonstrate the potential of the dual length scale formulation, in particular through a decrease of the innovation statistics for salinity profiles. The dual length scale formulation is now operational at the Met Office.

Assessing equatorial surface currents in the FOAM Global and Indian Ocean models against observations from the global tropical moored buoy array

Surface currents from 2007–2008 hindcasts of the Forecast Ocean Assimilation Model (FOAM) Global and Indian Ocean models are assessed against observations at 46 global tropical moored buoy array sites. Zonal (u) currents are less challenging to model than meridional flows (v) due to their lower frequency variability. The assimilative global model has reasonable skill for zonal currents but less skill for meridional currents. The assimilative models have higher skill than the corresponding non-assimilative models. A too-strong westward bias of the order of 20cm/s is evident along the equator in all model versionsused in this study. No extra skill is evident in the high resolution (1/12°) regional model compared to the coarser resolution (1/4°) global model.