Real-Time Global Ocean Forecasting with Navy Coupled Ocean Data Assimilation System at National Centers for Environmental Prediction

Present version of Real-Time Ocean Forecasting System (RTOFS) at the National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP) generates 8 days of ocean forecasts including sea-ice using the 1/12th degree HYbrid Coordinate Ocean Model (HYCOM) with restarts from US Naval Oceanographic Office (NAVOCEANO). The objective is to apply the Navy Coupled Ocean Data Assimilation (NCODA) system in-house at NCEP and transition to operations in a few months.

Unlike many other data assimilation systems, NCODA has a state-of-the-art Quality Control (QC) system built-in along with its 3 dimensional variational (3D-VAR) algorithm. The ocean data received at NCEP is pre-processed and QC’ed. The results of the QA/QC and the coupled assimilation with sea-ice will be presented and discussed. In addition, metrics to evaluate the model results and comparison to the NAVOCEANO model results will also be presented.