Evaluation of real time and future global monitoring and forecasting systems at Mercator Océan
Abstract. Since December 2010, the global analysis and forecast of the MyOcean system consists in the Mercator Océan NEMO global 1/4° configuration with a 1/12° "zoom" over the Atlantic and Mediterranean Sea. The zoom open boundaries come from the global 1/4° at 20° S and 80° N. The data assimilation uses a reduced order Kalman filter with a 3-D multivariate modal decomposition of the forecast error. It includes an adaptative error and a localization algorithm. A 3D-Var scheme corrects for the slowly evolving large-scale biases in temperature and salinity. Altimeter data, satellite temperature and in situ temperature and salinity vertical profiles are jointly assimilated to estimate the initial conditions for the numerical ocean forecasting. This paper gives a description of the recent systems. The validation procedure is introduced and applied to the current and future systems. This paper shows how the validation impacts on the quality of the systems. It is shown how quality check (in situ, drifters) and data source (satellite temperature) impacts as much as the systems design (model physics and assimilation parameters). The validation demonstrates the accuracy of the MyOcean global products. Their quality is stable in time. The future systems under development still suffer from a drift. This could only be detected with a 5 yr hindcast of the systems. This emphasizes the need for continuous research efforts in the process of building future versions of MyOcean2 forecasting capacities.