Comparative analysis of the North Atlantic surface circulation reproduced by three different methods

Abstract

Calculation results are presented for long-term mean annual surface currents in the North Atlantic based on direct drifter measurements and numerical experiments with the ocean general circulation model using both climatic arrays of hydrological data World Ocean Atlas 2009 and Argo profiling data. The calculations show that the technique suggested for model calculations of oceanographic characteristics of the World Ocean with the use of Argo data significantly improves the climatic fields of the temperature and salinity even on a coarse grid. The comparison of the model calculation results with drifter data showed that the temperature and salinity fields found from Argo data with the use of data variational interpolation on a regular grid allow the calculation of realistic currents and can be successfully used as initial conditions in hydrodynamic models of the ocean dynamics.