An Ocean Reanalysis System for the Joining Area of Asia and Indian-Pacific Ocean

Abstract

An ocean reanalysis system for the joining area of Asia and Indian-Pacific Ocean (AIPO) has been developed and is currently delivering reanalysis data sets for study on the air-sea interaction over AIPO and its climate variation over China in the inter-annual time scale. This system consists of a nested ocean model forced by atmospheric reanalysis, an ensemble-based multivariate ocean data assimilation system and various ocean observations. The following report describes the main components of the data assimilation system in detail. The system adopts an ensemble optimal interpolation scheme that uses a seasonal update from a free running model to estimate the background error covariance matrix. In view of the systematic biases in some observation systems, some treatments were performed on the observations before the assimilation. A coarse resolution reanalysis dataset from the system is preliminarily evaluated to demonstrate the performance of the system for the period 1992 to 2006 by comparing this dataset with other observations or reanalysis data.