Gulf of Mexico HYCOM forecasts during the GLAD experiment (June - December, 2012)

The temperature, velocity, and SSHA fields used in the analyses are from a Gulf of Mexico forecast system based on the HYbrid Coordinate Ocean Model (HYCOM) (Bleck, 2002; Chassignet et al., 2007). The implementation used here has ~ 4km horizontal resolution and 20 layers in the vertical. The surface forcing (winds and heat fluxes) are taken from the 0.5 degree Navy Global Atmospheric Prediction System (Rosmond, 1992), the open lateral boundary conditions are extracted from a multi-year North Atlantic HYCOM configuration, and the K-profile parametrization is used for vertical mixing (Large et al., 1994). See Prasad and Hogan (2007) for specific details of these implementations. The forecast system assimilates satellite altimeter and temperature data as well as all available in situ surface and profile observations for temperature and salinity via the Navy Coupled Ocean Data Assimilation System (Cummings, 2005). This system has been generating three-dimensional forecasts of temperature, salinity, and velocity on a daily basis since September 2009. This dataset was created by the Consortium for Advanced Research on Transport of Hydrocarbon in the Environment (CARTHE). This research was made possible by a grant from BP/The Gulf of Mexico Research Initiative.