Overview of Operational Global Ocean Forecasting at the Naval Oceanographic Office

The operational Global HYCOM (a 1/12° HYbrid Coordinate Ocean Model) is run daily by model operators and ocean forecasters at the Naval Oceanographic Office (NAVOCEANO). An Arctic version (Arctic Cap Nowcast/Forecast System, or ACNFS) is also run daily at NAVOCEANO alongside the global model, which has a similar configuration but includes a sea-ice simulating component called the Community Ice Code (CICE). This talk will focus on how HYCOM is configured on the Navy DoD Supercomputing Resource Center (DSRC) systems, the source of meteorological and climatological forcing, and the process by which vast amounts of in situ and satellite observations are quality controlled and assimilated using the Navy Coupled Ocean Data Assimilation (NCODA) system. Also to be discussed in this presentation: how HYCOM results are monitored and analyzed by NAVOCEANO ocean subject matter experts to create ocean forecast products. Some results of these analyses will be presented, which show that, while some issues have been discovered, model-predicted mesoscale features generally match in situ data.