Regional Ocean Climatologies: A New Line of Ocean Climate Research Tools

Alexey V Mishonov1,2, Krisa M Arzayus2, Olga Baranova2, Tim Boyer2, Arthur Rost Parsons2 and Dan Seidov2, (1)Cooperative Institute for Climate and Satellites University of Maryland, College Park, MD, United States, (2)National Centers for Environmental Information (formerly NODC), NESDIS/NOAA, Silver Spring, MD, United States
Abstract:
National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) has recently begun developing a new line of products that are collectively defined as Regional Ocean Climatologies, or, when attributed to a specific region, just Regional Climatology (RC). There are five RC products developed to date—the Gulf of Mexico, East Asian Seas, Arctic & Greenland-Iceland-Norwegian Seas, and the Northwest Atlantic (NWA) RC. The newest NWA RC, which has been recently published (http://www.nodc.noaa.gov/OC5/regional_climate/nwa-climate/) is discussed in more details. A key for the success in generating a regional climatology is availability of historical oceanographic data in the selected region and the spatial data coverage sufficient for building an unambiguous statistics. In all five NCEI RCs, the data coverage is either good or acceptable in large parts of the selected regions. Therefore the regional climatology buildups were deemed successful and may become a useful tool for applied oceanographic research and projects. The annual and seasonal objectively analyzed temperature and salinity and in some cases other essential oceanographic parameters were substantiated in all mentioned climatologies at up to 1/10-degree spatial resolution. However, essential inherent problems arise in monthly fields assembled on the high resolution 1/10-degree grid. We are discussing some of these problems and conceivable approaches to address them using re-iterative quality control and subsequent climatology rerun cycles on the fine resolution grid. The re-iterative quality control facilitates better regional climatologies on decadal and longer scales. The NWA RC is used here to demonstrate superiority of the finer-resolution decadal climatologies over coarser-scale ones and exemplifies how the re-iterative quality control helps improving both finer and coarser-resolution decadal climatological fields. The climate pattern trends in the NWA region are being presented and discussed using a retrospective view of the six decadal climatologies covering time interval from 1955 to 2012.
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