Abstract
In order to be able to forecast the weather and estimate future climate changes in the ocean, it is crucial to understand the past and the mechanisms responsible for the ocean variability. This is particularly true in a complex area such as the Mediterranean Sea with diverse dynamics like deep convection and overturning circulation. To this end, effective tools are ocean reanalyses or reconstructions of the past ocean state. Here we present a new physical reanalysis of the Mediterranean Sea at high resolution, developed in the Copernicus Marine Environment Monitoring Service (CMEMS) framework. The hydrodynamic model is based on the Nucleus for European Modelling of the Ocean (NEMO) combined with a variational data assimilation scheme (OceanVar). The model has a horizontal resolution of 1/24° and 141 unevenly distributed vertical z* levels. It provides daily and monthly temperature, salinity, current, sea level and mixed layer depth as well as hourly fields for surface velocities and sea level. ECMWF ERA-5 atmospheric fields force the model and daily boundary conditions in the Atlantic are taken from a global reanalysis. The reanalysis covers the 33 years from 1987 to 2019. Initialized from SeaDataNet climatology in January 1985, it reaches a nominal state after a 2-years spin-up. In-situ data from CTD, ARGO floats and XBT are assimilated into the model in combination with satellite altimetry observations. This reanalysis has been validated and assessed through comparison to in-situ and satellite observations as well as literature climatologies. The results show an overall improvement of the comparison with observations and a better representation of the main dynamics of the region compared to a previous, lower resolution (1/16°), reanalysis. Temperature and salinity RMSD are decreased by respectively 14 and 18%. The salinity biases at depth of the previous version are corrected. Climate signals show continuous increase of the temperature and salinity, confirming estimates from observations and other reanalysis. The new reanalysis will allow the study of physical processes at multi-scales, from the large scale to the transient small mesoscale structures and the selection of climate indicators for the basin.
Highlights
Reanalysis is a crucial tool to understand the events of the past and help us find the underlying processes that should be represented by the numerical models
The model is forced by momentum, water and heat fluxes interactively computed by bulk formulae using the ERA5 reanalysis dataset (30 km horizontal resolution and hourly time frequency, Hersbach et al, 2020) and the model surface temperatures
This is done in the Copernicus Marine Environment Monitoring Service (CMEMS) OMI where the heat content deviation from a reference period (1993–2014) integrated over the 0–700 m depth layer is computed for global reanalyses and observation-only based products
Summary
Korea Smitha Ratheesh, Space Applications Centre (ISRO), India Chunxue Yang, National Research Council (CNR), Italy. In order to be able to forecast the weather and estimate future climate changes in the ocean, it is crucial to understand the past and the mechanisms responsible for the ocean variability This is true in a complex area such as the Mediterranean Sea with diverse dynamics like deep convection and overturning circulation. The model has a horizontal resolution of 1/24° and 141 unevenly distributed vertical z* levels It provides daily and monthly temperature, salinity, current, sea level and mixed layer depth as well as hourly fields for surface velocities and sea level. In-situ data from CTD, ARGO floats and XBT are assimilated into the model in combination with satellite altimetry observations This reanalysis has been validated and assessed through comparison to in-situ and satellite observations as well as literature climatologies.
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