Chapter 7.1 Towards a woce synthesis

Abstract

Publisher Summary The primary goal of World Ocean Circulation Experiment (WOCE) is to obtain an understanding of the large-scale circulation of the world ocean, its time variability, and its impact on climate. Description and understanding of the oceans at basin and global scales is addressed during the WOCE Analysis, Interpretation, Modeling and Synthesis (AIMS) phase. From global WOCE (including altimetry) and pre-WOCE data sets and through improved modeling capabilities, it is evident that the ocean has vigorous variability on all time and space scales. Increasing emphasis is put therefore on the changing ocean state and its relation to changing atmospheric forcing conditions at time scales of intraseasonal to decadal. To proceed toward understanding this variability, a requirement of the WOCE synthesis phase is to provide the best possible description of the time-evolving ocean state during the WOCE period. WOCE syntheses merges information from various WOCE data sets to enhance the understanding of the ocean circulation in a way that is more complete than can be done from one data set or model alone. Three associated and overlapping activities are central to synthesis activities—namely, (1) analysis, (2) model testing and improvements, and (3) ocean state estimation.