Towards a High-Resolution Global-Ocean and Sea-Ice Data Synthesis

To increase understanding and predictive capability for the ocean's role in
past and future climate change scenarios, the consortium for Estimating the
Circulation and Climate of the Ocean (ECCO) aims to produce a best possible
synthesis of most available global-scale oceanic data obtained during the past
few decades.  ECCO data syntheses are obtained via the least-squares fit of
global, full-depth ocean configurations of the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology general circulation model to the available satellite and in-situ
data.  ECCO has demonstrated the feasibility of carrying out these challenging
computations and the resulting estimates have proven useful for a wide variety
of oceanographic and interdisciplinary studies.  Existing solutions, however,
have several shortcomings, including coarse resolution and a lacking
representation of Arctic Ocean and sea-ice processes.  To address these and
other shortcomings, a new high-resolution ocean state estimation project,
ECCO2, has been initiated under the auspices of the NASA Modeling, Analysis,
and Prediction Program.  This talk will discuss motivation, challenges, and
prospects for this project and will showcase some early results from users
working with pre-release ECCO2 products.