A new global four-dimensional variational ocean data assimilation system and its application

A four-dimensional variational data assimilation (4DVar) system of the LASG/IAP Climate Ocean Model, version 1.0 (LICOM1.0), named LICOM-3DVM, has been developed using the three-dimensional variational data assimilation of mapped observation (3DVM), a 4DVar method newly proposed in the past two years. Two experiments with 12-year model integrations were designed to validate it. One is the assimilation run, called ASSM, which incorporated the analyzed weekly sea surface temperature (SST) fields from Reynolds and Smith (OISST) between 1990 and 2001 once a week by the LICOM-3DVM. The other is the control run without any assimilation, named CTL. ASSM shows that the simulated temperatures of the upper ocean (above 50 meters), especially the SST of equatorial Pacific, coincide with the Tropic Atmosphere Ocean (TAO) mooring data, the World Ocean Atlas 2001 (WOA01) data and the Met Office Hadley Centre's sea ice and sea surface temperature (HadISST) data. It decreased the cold bias existing in CTL in the eastern Pacific and produced a Niño index that agrees with observation well. The validation results suggest that the LICOM-3DVM is able to effectively adjust the model results of the ocean temperature, although it's hard to correct the subsurface results and it even makes them worse in some areas due to the incorporation of only surface data. Future development of the LICOM-3DVM is to include subsurface in situ observations and satellite observations to further improve model simulations.