A high resolution free surface model of the Mediterranean Sea

Overview & Synopsis

This study describes a new model implementation for the Mediterranean Sea which has the presently highest vertical resolution over the Mediterranean basin. The resolution is of 1/16°×1/16° in horizontal and 71 unevenly spaced vertical levels. This model has been developed in the frame of the EU-MFSTEP project and it is the operational forecast model presently used at the basin scale. For the first time in the Mediterranean, the model considers an implicit free surface and this characteristics enhances the model capability to simulate the sea surface height variability. In this study we show the calibration/validation experiments done before and after the model has been used for forecasting. The first experiment consist of six years of a simulation forced by a perpetual year forcing and the other experiment is a simulation from January 1997 to December 2004, forcing the model with 6 h atmospheric forcing fields from ECMWF. For the first time the model Sea Level Anomaly is compared with SLA and with ARGO data to provide evidence of the quality of the simulation. The results show that this model is capable to reproduce most of the variability of the general circulation in the Mediterranean Sea even if some basic model inadequacies stand out and should be corrected in the near future.