Development of an Operational Regional Northeast Pacific Ocean-Biogeochemical Modeling System: Skill Assessment of Retrospective Seasonal Forecasts

In response to challenges related to climate change impacting the nation’s marine ecosystems, fisheries, coastal communities and economics, the Climate, Ecosystems, and Fisheries Initiative (CEFI) has been developed. CEFI is a cross-NOAA effort to build the nationwide, operational ocean modeling and decision support system needed to reduce impacts, increase resilience, and help adapt to changing ocean conditions. The goal of the system is to provide decision makers with the actionable information they need to prepare for and respond to rapidly changing conditions. The backbone of CEFI is a regional ocean modeling component interfacing with other operational NOAA modeling systems to deliver daily to decadal operational forecasts and longer-term (multi-decadal) projections. Here, we present a newly developed regional Northeast Pacific modeling system consisting of the Modular Ocean Model version 6 (MOM6) coupled to a sea ice model (SIS2). The coast-wide domain extends from the tropical Pacific to the Chukchi Sea shelf. We assess ~30 years of retrospective seasonal (12 month) forecasts of the physical state variables for this region. Output fields from a global forecast system are used to initialize and force the regional forecasts. We also test the sensitivity of the forecasts to initial conditions and forcing. Forecast skill is assessed based on observation-derived products and ocean reanalysis.