Once a year in April, and for the second time after the April 2010 issue, the Mercator Ocean Forecasting Center in Toulouse and the Coriolis Infrastructure in Brest publish a common newsletter. Some papers are dedicated to observations only, when others display collaborations between the 2 aspects: Observations and Modelling/Data assimilation.
The two first papers introducing this issue are presenting the data requirement for the GMES Marine Core Service (Le Traon and Pouliquen) and the Eurosites Open Ocean Observatory Network (Larkin et al.). Then, Doxaran et al. are writing about the Provpanache project which uses of ProvBio floats to study the dynamics of suspended particles in river plumes. Two papers are then dealing with eXpendable BathyThermograph (XBT) observations: Hamon et al. start with “Empirical correction of XBT fall rate” and shows that maximum heat content in the top 700 meters found in earlier studies can be explained by now identified XBT biases. XBT are also used by Maes et al. who look at the geostrophic component of oceanic jets entering in the eastern Coral Seas. Next, Brion et al. are using complementary in situ data among which Thermosalinographs (TSG) for the calibration and validation of SMOS. The two last papers of the present issue are displaying the collaboration between the Ocean Observations and Ocean Modelling communities: Juza et al. are using a numerical model in order to determine how the Argo array could be extended to better monitor the Global Ocean heat
content variability. Drevillon et al. are then presenting the Mercator Ocean quaterly validation bulletin “Quo Va Dis?” which is using the Coriolis data in order to draw the picture of the quality of the Mercator Ocean products.
We will meet again next year in April 2012 for a new jointly coordinated Newsletter between Mercator Ocean and Coriolis. Regarding next July 2011 Newsletter coordinated by Mercator Ocean only, it will display papers about the latest space missions and their use for oceanography and research.
We wish you a pleasant reading,
Laurence Crosnier and Sylvie Pouliquen, Editors.