Quality Assessment of a 1985-2007 Mediterranean Sea re-analysis

Abstract

A simulation and two re-analyses from 1985 to 2007 have been produced for the Mediterranean Sea using different assimilation schemes: a Reduced Order Optimal Interpolation (SOFA) and a three-dimensional variational scheme (OceanVar). The observational data set consists of vertical temperature and salinity in-situ profiles and along-track satellite sea-level anomalies; daily mean fields of satellite sea surface temperature are used for correcting the air-sea fluxes. This paper assesses the quality of the re-analyses with respect to observations and the simulation. Both the SOFA and OceanVar schemes give very similar root mean square errors and biases for temperature and salinity fields compared with the assimilated observations. The largest errors are at the thermocline level and in regions of large eddy field variability. However, OceanVar gives 20% better results for sea-level anomaly root mean square error.