How essential are Argo observations to constrain a global ocean data assimilation system?
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Abstract
Abstract. Observing System Experiments (OSEs) are carried out over a one-year period to quantify the impact of Argo observations on the Mercator-Ocean 1/4° global ocean analysis and forecasting system. The reference simulation assimilates sea surface temperature (SST), SSALTO/DUACS altimeter data and Argo and other in situ observations from the Coriolis data center. Two other simulations are carried out where all Argo and half of Argo data sets are withheld. Assimilating Argo observations has a significant impact on analyzed and forecast temperature and salinity fields at different depths. Without Argo data assimilation, large errors occur in analyzed fields as estimated from the differences when compared with in situ observations. For example, in the 0–300 m layer RMS differences between analyzed fields and observations reach 0.25 psu and 1.25 °C in the western boundary currents and 0.1 psu and 0.75 °C in the open ocean. The impact of the Argo data in reducing observation-model forecast error is also significant from the surface down to a depth of 2000 m. Differences between independent observations and forecast fields are thus reduced by 20 % in the upper layers and by up to 40 % at a depth of 2000 m when Argo data are assimilated. At depth, the most impacted regions in the global ocean are the Mediterranean outflow and the Labrador Sea. A significant degradation can be observed when only half of the data are assimilated. All Argo observations thus matter, even with a 1/4° model resolution. The main conclusion is that the performance of global data assimilation systems is heavily dependent on the availability of Argo data.
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Water mass observations over the full water column have been shown to improve reanalysis fields locally by several units in temperature and salinity.
“From an uncoupled ocean perspective, there is also a strong impact from water mass observations over the full water column, which have been shown to improve reanalysis fields locally by several units in temperature and salinity (Oke et al., 2015;Turpin et al., 2016;Gasparin et al., 2018).”
From The tropical atlantic observing system (2019) · cites this paper as Turpin et al., 2016
The Conclusion reports that assimilating Argo observations improves temperature and salinity analyses and reduces observation–forecast differences; §3.1 finds locally substantial effects. But the study covers profiles from the surface to 2000 m, not the full water column, and its reported differences are around 1 °C and tenths of a psu, not several units of both temperature and salinity. (LLM, conf=0.88)
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The tropical atlantic observing system
Foltz, G. R., Brandt, P., Richter, I., Rodríguez-Fonseca, B., Hernandez, F., Dengler, M., Rodrigues, R. R., Schmidt, J. O., Yu, L., Lefevre, N., et al. (2019) · Frontiers in Marine Science · doi:10.3389/fmars.2019.00206 · Cited by 150 · see citing works
- Authors
- Turpin, V., Remy, E., & Le Traon, P. Y.
- Affiliations
- Institut Pierre-Simon Laplace (FR)
- Corresponding author
- Turpin, V.
- ORCID
- Le Traon, P. Y.
- Venue
- Ocean Science
- Publisher
- Copernicus GmbH
- Published
- 2016-02-16
- Volume
- 12
- Issue
- 1
- Pages
- 257-274
- ISSN
- 1812-0784 (ISSN-L)
- 1812-0792
- OpenAlex
- W1559870383
- Cited by
- 29
- References
- 1
- Citations by year
- 2026: 1 · 2025: 3 · 2024: 5 · 2023: 4 · 2020: 3 · 2019: 6 · 2018: 3 · 2017: 3 · 2016: 1
- FWCI
- 3.51
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- gold
- doi.org
- Licence
- Locations
- Ocean science (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- HAL (submittedVersion)
- Institutional Archive of Ifremer (French Research Institute for Exploitation of the Sea) (submittedVersion)
- DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals) (submittedVersion, cc-by-sa)
- Funders
- Agence Nationale de la Recherche (ANR-10-EQPX-0040)
- Centre National d’Etudes Spatiales
- Topics
- Physical Sciences › Earth and Planetary Sciences › Oceanography › Oceanographic and Atmospheric Processes
- Physical Sciences › Earth and Planetary Sciences › Atmospheric Science › Meteorological Phenomena and Simulations
- Physical Sciences › Engineering › Ocean Engineering › Underwater Vehicles and Communication Systems
- Keywords
- Argo floats, observing system experiments, ocean data assimilation, sea surface temperature, salinity, altimeter data, western boundary currents, Mediterranean outflow, Gulf Stream, Labrador Sea, eddy-permitting model, observation impact
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