ECCO2: High Resolution Global Ocean and Sea Ice Data Synthesis

The Estimating the Circulation and Climate of the Ocean, Phase II (ECCO2) project aims to produce a best- possible, time-evolving synthesis of most available ocean and sea-ice data at a resolution that permits ocean eddies. ECCO2 analyses are obtained via least squares fit of a global, full-depth-ocean, and sea-ice configuration of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology general circulation model (MITgcm) to the available satellite and in-situ data. What sets apart ECCO2 analyses from operational high-resolution ocean data assimilation products is their physical consistency; the analyses do not contain discontinuities when and where data are ingested. ECCO2 analyses are intended to help quantify the role of the oceans in the global carbon cycle, to understand the recent evolution of the polar oceans, to monitor time-evolving term balances within and between different components of the Earth system, and for many other science applications. A first ECCO2 analysis for the 1992-2007 period has been obtained using a Green's Function approach to estimate initial temperature and salinity conditions, surface boundary conditions, and several empirical model parameters. Data constraints include altimetry, gravity, drifter, hydrographic, and sea-ice data. A large complement of high-frequency and high-resolution diagnostics has been saved; these diagnostics are made available to the scientific community via ftp and OPeNDAP servers at http://ecco2.org. This presentation provides a brief overview of this first ECCO2 analysis, of the estimation methodology, of the solution characteristics, and of some early science applications.