Charles Desportes, Charly Régnier, Bruno Levier, Coralie Perruche, Lionel Zawadzki, Marie Drévillon (MERCATOR OCEAN/Production Dep./Products Quality)

Eric Greiner (CLS), Jean-Michel Lellouche, Olivier Le Galloudec (MERCATOR OCEAN)

Credits for validation methodology and tools:
Eric Greiner, Mounir Benkiran, Nathalie Verbrugge, Hélène Etienne (CLS),
Fabrice Hernandez, Laurence Crosnier (MERCATOR OCEAN),
Jean-Michel Lellouche, Olivier Le Galloudec, Nicolas Ferry, Gilles Garric (MERCATOR OCEAN),
Stéphane Law Chune (Météo-France), Julien Paul (Links), Lionel Zawadzki (AS+),
Jean-Marc Molines (LGGE), Sébastien Theeten (Ifremer), Mélanie Juza (IMEDEA), the DRAKKAR and
NEMO groups, the BCG group (Météo-France, CERFACS),
Bruno Blanke, Nicolas Grima, Rob Scott (LPO),
Information on input data:
Christine Boone, Gaël Nicolas (CLS/ARMOR team)

This bulletin gives an estimate of the accuracy of MERCATOR OCEAN’s analyses and forecast for the season of January-February-March 2013. It also provides a summary of useful information on the context of the production for this period. Diagnostics will be displayed for the global 1/12° (PSY4), global ¼° (PSY3), the Atlantic and Mediterranean zoom at 1/12° (PSY2), and the Iberia-Biscay-Ireland (IBI) monitoring and forecasting systems currently producing daily 3D temperature, salinity and current products. Surface Chlorophyll concentrations from the BIOMER biogeochemical monitoring and forecasting system are also displayed and compared with simultaneous observations. New Lagrangian diagnostics are displayed which measure the quality of the surface velocity forecasts. The latest updates of the PSY2, PSY3 and PSY4 systems are introduced in section VIII , and illustrated with results for JFM 2013.