Assessment of Several Ocean Reanalyzes about North Equatorial Current at 160° E

Jiahao Wang,Kefeng Mao,Xi Chen

doi:10.3390/jmse8090648

Abstract

Three ocean reanalyzes including Simple Ocean Data Assimilation (SODA), Hybrid Coordinate Ocean Model, and the Navy Coupled Ocean Data Assimilation (HYCOM+NCODA) analysis, and the Ocean General Circulation Model for the Earth Simulator (OFES) are assessed about their ability of depicting the structure of North Equatorial Current (NEC) at 160° E. We found that these products could reflect the structure of NEC relatively well at the whole section, but not at the single point through comparing their results with mooring and cruising measurement, and the OFES is the best choice to study mesoscale processes versus the other two reanalyzes through comparing their results with satellite measurement.

Highlights

Ocean reanalyzes are widely used to investigate ocean phenomena nowadays. They are regarded by many oceanographers as the realistic representations of ocean
The work about assessing ocean reanalyzes is really important for an analysis or forecast in the field of operational oceanography
A subsurface mooring was deployed in June 2014 and retrieved in May 2016 at 160◦ E, 15◦ N

Summary

Introduction

Ocean reanalyzes are widely used to investigate ocean phenomena nowadays. They are regarded by many oceanographers as the realistic representations of ocean. Zhai et al [2] used satellite altimetry data to evaluate multiple ocean products in the region of North Equatorial Current (NEC) through comparing annual mean horizontal currents and calculating linear correlations at six tidal gauge stations. Since their assessment was based on the offshore or single station data, the effectiveness of these products about open sea or large section cannot be ensured. Zhai et al [3] compared a high-resolution data assimilation with altimetry observations and current measurements, but the problem mentioned is still unresolved

Methods

Results

Conclusion