A Dynamically Consistent Combination of TOPEX/POSEIDON Observations and the MIT OGCM in the North Atlantic Ocean



Nadia Ayoub, Detlef Stammer and Carl Wunsch



Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Introduction

 
The main objective of our work is to study the time-varying circulation of the North Atlantic over the last 6 years. Typical questions we aim at addressing are: what are the structures of the space-time variability of the circulation ? What is the variability of the meridional mass transports ? The procedure is to combine altimetric and hydrographic observations with a general circulation model. In this regional scale study, the question of defining proper open boundaries arises. The extent to which open-boundaries conditions can be improved by constraining the model with data is an important issue. We present below the first results of an optimization experiment over the year 1993 (a parallel experiment over the period 1992-97 is also continuing).