The first face-to-face meeting of the Mercator Ocean International (MOI) Data Assimilation Expert Team took place in Toulouse on April 16th to the 17th. It is an annual meeting that brings together MOI shareholders and interested parties to discuss evolutions and best-practices for data assimilation. They discuss innovations and possible collaborations, from which the results can benefit many oceanographic numerical models.

The meeting objective was to discuss the potential for collaborative work among the MOI shareholders on three main subjects: the assimilation of sea surface height data, methods to generate reliable ensembles, and how to model observation correlations. This collaboration can bring improvements to a wide-range of models including the global Copernicus Marine physical model, regional MOI models, and models specific to the shareholders. There were multiple shareholder representatives at the meeting from: CNRS, Met Office UK, NERSC, Meteo France, and CMCC. Other interested parties attended, including CERFACS.