Evaluating Ocean Models

Ocean currents, temperature, salinity, and sea surface height observations are used to evaluate the results of 3 different ocean models. The models are: the Navy Coastal Ocean Model (NCOM), the Coupled Ocean/Atmosphere Mesoscale Prediction System (COAMPS), and the HYbrid Coordinate Ocean Model (HYCOM). The oceanic horizontal resolution of NCOM and COAMPS is ~3.7 km, and ~8.5 km for HYCOM. The 8 different observation types used in the model evaluation (comparison of model output versus observations) are: drifting buoys, temperature profiles, salinity profiles, sonic layer depth, below layer gradient, mixed layer depth, cutoff frequency, and satellite sea surface height. To measure and keep count of the models’ performance in each different metric a scorecard was generated translating the models’ errors into scores, which provide an indication of the models’ performance in both space and time.