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The new eddy-permitting ORAP5 ocean reanalysis: description, evaluation and uncertainties in climate signals

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Abstract

A new eddy-permitting ocean reanalysis has been recently completed at ECMWF. It is called Ocean ReAnalysis Pilot 5 (ORAP5), and it spans the period 1979–2012. This work describes the new system, evaluates its performance, and investigates how the estimation of climate indices are affected by the assimilation system settings. ORAP5 introduces several upgrades with respect to its predecessor ORAS4, including increased horizontal and vertical resolution, an prognostic sea-ice component, new versions of the ocean and data assimilation system, revised surface fluxes, new version and treatment of satellite sea surface height data, and assimilation of sea-ice concentration, among others. ORAP5 shows similar performance to ORAS4, with improvements in the northern extratropics (especially in salinity), and slight degradation in the Southern Ocean, probably because the observations are insufficient to constrain the increased level of variability in ORAP5. The sensitivity experiments show that superobbing of altimeter data and correlation length-scales of the background errors have a visible impact on the time evolution of global steric height and its partition into thermo/halo-steric contributions. The sensitivities are especially large in the pre-Argo period, when there is the risk of producing unrealistic steric height variations by overfitting the altimeter data. Compared with a control run without data assimilation, all the assimilation experiments also show stronger variability in the halosteric component in the pre-Argo period. The results highlight the importance of sub-surface observations to assist the assimilation of altimeter data, and the need of using a variety of metrics for evaluating ocean reanalysis systems.

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Acknowledgments

This work has been carried out under the support of EU MyOcean2 project and the ESA CCI initiative. Thanks to Jean Marc Molines from LGGE and Andrew Coward from NOCS for providing the input files for the DRAKKAR reference NEMO ORCA025 configurations and assisting with the implementation of NEMO. Thanks to the members of the NEMOVAR team. We would also like to thank the three anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, Reading, UK

    Hao Zuo, Magdalena A. Balmaseda & Kristian Mogensen

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  1. Hao Zuo
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  2. Magdalena A. Balmaseda
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  3. Kristian Mogensen
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Correspondence to Hao Zuo.

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This paper is a contribution to the special issue on Ocean estimation from an ensemble of global ocean reanalyses, consisting of papers from the Ocean Reanalyses Intercomparsion Project (ORAIP), coordinated by CLIVAR-GSOP and GODAE OceanView. The special issue also contains specific studies using single reanalysis systems.

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Zuo, H., Balmaseda, M.A. & Mogensen, K. The new eddy-permitting ORAP5 ocean reanalysis: description, evaluation and uncertainties in climate signals. Clim Dyn 49, 791–811 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-015-2675-1

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