Abstract
Abstract. Sustainable management and utilisation of the North-west European Shelf (NWS) seas could benefit from reliable forecasts of the marine environment on monthly to seasonal timescales. Recent advances in global seasonal forecast systems and regional marine reanalyses for the NWS allow us to investigate the potential for seasonal forecasts of the state of the NWS. We identify three possible approaches to address this issue: (A) basing NWS seasonal forecasts directly on output from the Met Office's GloSea5 global seasonal forecast system; (B) developing empirical downscaling relationships between large-scale climate drivers predicted by GloSea5 and the state of the NWS; and (C) dynamically downscaling GloSea5 using a regional model. We show that the GloSea5 system can be inadequate for simulating the NWS directly (approach A). We explore empirical relationships between the winter North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) and NWS variables estimated using a regional reanalysis (approach B). We find some statistically significant relationships and present a skillful prototype seasonal forecast for English Channel sea surface temperature. We find large-scale relationships between inter-annual variability in the boundary conditions and inter-annual variability modelled on the shelf, suggesting that dynamic downscaling may be possible (approach C). We also show that for some variables there are opposing mechanisms correlated with the NAO, for which dynamic downscaling may improve on the skill possible with empirical forecasts. We conclude that there is potential for the development of reliable seasonal forecasts for the NWS and consider the research priorities for their development.
Highlights
1.1 BackgroundThe North-west European Shelf (NWS) seas are of wide economic, environmental, and political importance
DFT is an important diagnostic of stratification; when DFT > 0.5 ◦C the water column is considered stratified, and the DFT = 0.5 ◦C isotherm is indicative of the location of the modelled tidal mixing fronts
The coastal ocean model version 5 (CO5) NWS reanalysis has been shown to have a generally good representation of the seasonal stratification for which independent observations are available (O’Dea et al, 2012). While both the CO5 NWS reanalysis and GloSea5 show that the NWS is fully mixed in the winter, in GloSea5 more grid boxes are stratified in the summer than in the NWS reanalysis; from April to September, the stratified area of the shelf is ∼ 20 % more in GloSea5 compared to the NWS reanalysis
Summary
The North-west European Shelf (NWS) seas are of wide economic, environmental, and political importance. They support many ecosystem services and human activities, including fisheries, energy extraction and transmission (both renewable and non-renewable), shipping, and waste removal. Most of these services and activities are sensitive to the variable environmental conditions under which they operate. – shipping (transport and industrial) and offshore oil, gas, and renewable operations are sensitive to wind and wave conditions and currents;. J. Tinker et al.: Prospects for seasonal prediction of the marine environment of the NW European Shelf?
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