Toward Submesocale Ocean Modelling and Observations for Global Ocean Forecast.

Abstract:

Mercator Ocean is the French oceanographic operational center involved in the development an operation of global high resolution ocean forecasting systems; it is part of the European Copernicus Marine service initiated during MyOcean project. Mercator Ocean currently delivers daily 1/12° global ocean forecast based on the NEMO model which allows for a good representation of mesoscale structures in main areas of the global ocean. Data assimilation of altimetry provides a precise initialization of the mesoscale structures while in situ observations, mainly based on the ARGO network, and satellite Sea Surface Temperature constrain water mass properties from the surface to intermediate depths.

One of the main improvements scheduled in the coming years is the transitioning towards submesoscale permitting horizontal resolution (1/36°). On the basis of numerical simulations in selected areas and standard diagnostics developed to validate operational systems, we will discuss : i) The impact of the resolution increase at the basin scale. ii) Adequacy of numerical schemes, vertical resolution and physical parameterization. iii) Adequacy of currently implemented data assimilation procedures in particular with respect to new high resolution data set such as SWOT.