Data Assimilation Meetings at Reading
| Date | Meeting type | Speakers |
| 21 May 2014 | Internal speaker |
Jon Robson (University of Reading)
A novel transport assimilation method for the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation at 26N (pdf) The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) is an important component of the climate system, transporting large amounts of heat Northward into the North Atlantic. Many studies indicate that variability of the AMOC has wide reaching impacts and so predicting its evolution could enable skillful multi-year-to-decadal predictions to be issued. Therefore, initialising the AMOC in climate predictions is an important goal. For the first time in history the AMOC is now continuously observed at 26N by a trans-basin array of moorings called the RAPID array, which provide high-frequency observations from the ocean surface to the ocean floor. However, this data is not routinely used in ocean state estimation, and assimilating the data into coupled prediction models that are usually low resolution has some interesting difficulties to overcome. In this talk I'll introduce a novel and simple way of assimilating the anomalous AMOC transport into the UK Met Offices Decadal Prediction System. Encouraging results showed that using the method significantly improved the AMOC variability in the assimilation run when we assimilated the AMOC data alone. However, the improvements are limited when the RAPID data is assimilated alongside other conventional data. This result suggests that further work is needed to improve the assimilation of RAPID data. |