EAPS

Title: Twenty-Years of the Global Ocean Circulation: Means and Changes

Abstract: An over-arching goal of the World Ocean Circulation Experiment (WOCE) was to describe and understand the full three-dimensional time- evolving global ocean circulation from days to about a decade. The intention was to quantify and understand its changing climate impacts. To that end, the Estimating the Ocean Circulation and Climate (ECCO) consortium was formed to exploit the global data sets that emerged from WOCE and its successor programs (Argo, altimetry, hydrography, meteorology, etc.) combined with a general circulation model. Now there exists a dynamically consistent time-evolving ocean state estimate also (almost) consistent with all of the data over 24 years. The state estimate makes possible discussion of basic budgets and their changes (heat and freshwater content, kinetic and potential energy), raises interesting questions of its meaning, accuracy and full depiction. I will emphasize the global ocean properties and their changes over 20 years with some representative regional examples. This talk constitutes an invitation to the wider community to extend the available analyses.


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