Evaluation of temperature and salinity fields of HYCOM reanalysis data in the East Sea

Abstract

We evaluate the temperature and salinity fields in the East Sea reproduced by the global ocean reanalysis data using HYbrid Coordinate Ocean Model (HYCOM for short). Temporal correlation of Sea Surface Temperature (SST) change between HYCOM and the Group for High Resolution Sea Surface Temperature (GHRSST) are higher in summer than winter. Though distributions of temperature and salinity in the HYCOM are similar to those from historical data (World Ocean Atlas 2013 V2), salinity in the HYCOM is lower (highter) in the region where the salinity is high (low). Temperature fields in the Ulleung basin of HYCOM are quite similar to those derived from Pressure-recording Inverted Echo Sounder (PIES), such as the correlation coefficient is higher than 0.7. This indicates that the HYCOM represents well the circulation and meso-scale phenomena in the Ulleung basin.