Validation and intercomparison of ocean surface circulation analyses and forecasts

Operational systems provide daily surface velocities that reproduce as closely as possible the state of the ocean, a field that lays at the base of many diverse applications such as routing or search and rescue. There’s a growing need to assess different systems’ ability to reproduce ocean dynamical processes covering a range of spatio-temporal scales so to inform on their suitability for use in a vast range of users’ applications.

Here we present an initiative for putting in place a multi-metric validation platform for the comparison of ocean currents making use of a number of service evolution developments and concepts (MEDSUB py_eddy_tracker, HIVE…). Such tool is aimed at being operable in any region of interest, applicable to any Copernicus Marine products on the Wekeo DIAS cloud access service.

We show an intercomparison of the mesoscale eddy field of different Copernicus Marine systems in the IBI area, together with a range of statistical metrics on surface currents (Eulerian and Lagrangian) comparing against drifting buoys’ velocity measurements. The use of this platform is illustrated with the case of the Grande America catastrophe within the Bay of Biscay in March 2019 to analyse the currents and in fine to help decision-making. Such approach is shown to provide relevant user-oriented uncertainty information for a range of applications.