| Abstract: | Procedures have been implemented at the Climate Analysis Center of the National Meteorological Center (CAC/NMC) to provide montly hindcasts of oceanographic conditions in the tropical Pacific. A central component of this system is a primitive equation ocean general circulation model that was developed at the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (GFDL). This is forced with monthly mean fields for wind stress and net heat flux. Until recently the former were derived from ship reports available on the Global Telecommunication System (GTS). The heat fluxes are slightly modified climatological fluxes from Esbensen and Kushnir. To correct for errors in the simulations, thermal data in the upper 450 and surface-temperature data are assimilated montly.Numerical experiments were run to examine the sensitivity of the simulations to small changes in the stress fields. Variations of the drag coefficient by 15% result in differences in sea-surface temperature (SST) and subsurface thermal structure in the eastern Pacific that are comparable with the observed annual and interannual variability. Comparisons with simulations in which the wind stresses were derived from operational atmospheric analyses show sensitivities of the same magnitude. Comparisons of simulations forced either with these of ship-recorded winds to a run with data assimilation show that significant errors are found in both, especially in the off-equatorial regions. Consequently, until forcing fields are improved, accurate simulations will require the use of data assimilation. |
