Tuesday 23 August 2005

P4

PT0119
The BLUElink ocean data assimilation system
Oke, Peter¹, Brassington, Gary², Schiller, Andreas¹
1 CSIRO Marine and Atmospheric Research, Hobart, Tasmania, Australia
2 Bureau Of Meteorology Research Centre, Melbourne, Vic, Australia
BLUElink is an Australian partnership between CSIRO, the Commonwealth Bureau of Meteorology and the Royal Australian Navy. The main objective of BLUElink is to develop a forecast system for the mesoscale ocean circulation around Australia. To this end, the Ocean Forecasting Australia Model (OFAM), a global ocean general circulation model with high-resolution around Australia, has been configured. The BLUElink Ocean Data Assimilation System (BODAS) is an ensemble-based multivariate optimal interpolation system that assimilates observations of sea-level, temperature and salinity into OFAM. BODAS is built within the framework of an ensemble Kalman Filter, but uses a 72-member stationary ensemble of modelled intraseasonal anomalies. The BLUElink ReANalysis (BRAN) experiment (1992-2004) that assimilates observations from a consolidation of many global data sets, including ERS, T/P, ARGO, WOCE, TAO and others, has been performed. Comparison with independent observations indicates that BRAN does a good job a qualitatively representing the eddy field around Australia. The model responds well to changes that are introduced by BODAS. The first operational forecasts using the BLUElink system are scheduled for 2006.

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