Publication Date:
2019-01-18
Description:
Although the stratification of the upper Arctic Ocean is mostly salinity-driven, the sea surface salinity (SSS) is still poorly known in the Arctic, due to its strong variability and the sparseness of in-situ observations. Recently, two gridded SSS products have been derived from the European Space Agency's (ESA) Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) mission, independently developed by the Barcelona Expert Centre (BEC) in Spain and the Ocean Salinity Expertise Center (CECOS) of the Centre Aval de Traitemenent des Donnees SMOS (CATDS) in France, respectively. In parallel, there are two reanalysis products providing the Arctic SSS in the framework of the Copernicus Marine Environment Monitoring Services (CMEMS), one global, and another regional product. While the regional Arctic TOPAZ4 system assimilates a large set of sea-ice and ocean observations with an Ensemble Kalman Filter, the global reanalysis combines in-situ and satellite data using a multivariate ensemble optimal interpolation method. In this study, focused on the Arctic Ocean, these four salinity products, together with the climatology both World Ocean Atlas (WOA) of 2013 and Polar science center Hydrographic Climatology (PHC), are evaluated against in-situ datasets during 2011–2013. For the validation the in-situ observations are divided in two; those that have been assimilated and those that have not. The deviations of SSS between the different products and against the in-situ observations show largest disagreements below the sea-ice and in the marginal ice zone (MIZ), especially during the summer months. In the Beaufort Sea, the summer SSS from the BEC product has the smallest – saline – bias (~0.6 psu) with the smallest root mean squared difference (RSMD) of 2.6 psu. This suggests a potential value of assimilating of this product into the forthcoming Arctic reanalyses. Keywords: Arctic Ocean; sea surface salinity; SMOS; reanalysis; absolute deviation;
Print ISSN:
1812-0806
Electronic ISSN:
1812-0822
Topics:
Geosciences
Permalink