Abstract
This work describes the design, implementation and validation of the Black Sea physics analysis and forecasting system, developed by the Black Sea Physics production unit within the Black Sea Monitoring and Forecasting Center as part of the Copernicus Marine Environment and Monitoring Service. The system provides analyses and forecasts of the temperature, salinity, sea surface height, mixed layer depth and currents for the whole Black Sea basin, excluding the Azov Sea, and has been operational since 2016. The system is composed of the NEMO (v 3.4) numerical model and an OceanVar scheme, which brings together real time observations (in-situ temperature and salinity profiles, sea level anomaly and sea surface temperature satellite data). An operational quality assessment framework is used to evaluate the accuracy of the products which set the basic standards for the future upgrades, highlighting the strengths and weaknesses of the model and the observing system in the Black Sea.
Highlights
The BSFS analysis sea surface temperature is assessed by comparing analysis model fields against SST satellite data remapped over the Black Sea basin at 1/16◦ spatial resolution and representative of night SST values and delivered by CMEMS (Table 1)
BSFS captures most of the particular dynamical structures in the basin, such as the Rim current, which persists over 2019, and small-scale structures such as coastal anticyclonic eddies, which appear along the Russian–Georgian coastline and coastal cyclonic eddies, which are much more intermittent over the year and weak)
The BSFS has been operational since the end of 2016 and has been developed and maintained at CMCC in collaboration with the USOF (University of Sofia, Bulgaria, scientific partner in the Black Sea Monitoring and Forecasting Center (BS-MFC) consortium)
Summary
BSFS is based on a free surface implementation of the NEMO hydrodynamical model (v3.4, [7]) for the Black Sea region. Where Tr B is the net transport at the Bosporus Strait, and A is the basin surface area, η is the sea surface height, E, P, R are, respectively, evaporation, precipitation and runoff, the Dirac δ is different from zero at 72 river mouths and the triangular brackets mean horizonal basin average. The values of the Bosporus discharge are stored as monthly mean values and set as vertical velocity boundary conditions as done for the rivers, except with the negative sign, indicating a discharge out of the basin or a “negative river”. This parametrization is quite robust for decadal long simulations that do not consider climate change trends in sea level and water fluxes. With regard to the 72 real river runoff contributions, we use monthly mean discharge data from the SESAME dataset [21] for all rivers, including the Danube, the Dniepr, the Dniester, the Rioni, the Kizil Irmak, and the Sakarya
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