Research

Improved diurnal variability forecast of ocean surface temperature through community model development

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Abstract

The diurnal variability of SST, driven by the coincident occurrence of moderately low winds and solar heating, is currently not properly understood and resolved in models and products from the Copernicus Marine Environment Monitoring Service (CMEMS) of high spatial resolution. This results in erroneous estimation of air-sea interactions and heat budget, which causes demised model accuracies. In addition, diurnal SST variability complicates merging of SSTs from different satellite sensors thus having a direct impact on efforts to create climate records. Finally, a misrepresentation of the diurnal variability of the upper ocean temperature may result in large errors when modelling harmful algal blooms. The “Improved Diurnal Variability Forecast of Ocean Surface Temperature through Community Model development (DIVOST-COM)” project aims at developing and integrating a diurnal variability model with the Baltic Modelling & Forecasting Center (MFC) 3D physical-biological model and the SST Technical Advisory Council (TAC) Level 4 analysis to improve existing products and services for the Baltic Sea. To achieve this, the existing 1-dimensional General Ocean Turbulence Model (GOTM) will be developed to a common modelling tool, which uses the MFC PHY-BIO forecast and SST Thematic Assembly Centre (TAC) products as input to resolve and forecast the vertical temperature structure of the upper ocean with very high resolution. The aim is to assess the ability of the operational HBM model to reproduce the variability of the upper ocean temperature and evaluate the magnitude of the simulated and observed diurnal variability in the Baltic Sea. Preliminary results indicate similar biases and root-mean-square-errors when compared to in situ measurements and an overall reduction of bias and RMSE with SEVIRI, for some of the GOTM simulations.