Charles Desportes, Marie Drévillon, Charly Régnier
(MERCATOR OCEAN/Production Dep./Products Quality)

Olivier Le Galloudec, Jean-Michel Lellouche, Bruno Levier, Gilles Garric (MERCATOR OCEAN/ Production Dep./R&D), Eric Greiner (CLS)

Eric Greiner, Mounir Benkiran, Nathalie Verbrugge, Hélène Etienne (CLS), Charly Régnier, Fabrice Hernandez, Laurence Crosnier (MERCATOR OCEAN), Nicolas Ferry, Gilles Garric , Jean-Michel Lellouche (MERCATOR OCEAN), Jean-Marc Molines (CNRS), Sébastien Theeten (Ifremer), Nicolas Pene (AKKA), Silvana Buarque (Météo-France)

Information on input data:
Christine Boone, Stéphanie Guinehut, Gaël Nicolas (CLS/ARMOR team)

This bulletin gives an estimate of the accuracy of MERCATOR OCEAN’s analyses and forecast for the season of July-August-September 2010. It also provides a summary of useful information on the context of the production for this period. Diagnostics will be displayed for the global ¼° (PSY3) and the Atlantic and Mediterranean zoom at 1/12° (PSY2) monitoring and forecasting systems currently producing daily 3D temperature salinity and current products. A special focus is made on the major improvements brought by the new versions of these systems, which products will be available by the end of this year. The realism of water masses characteristics is particularly improved in these systems, in addition to improvements of the physics due to the use of Incremental Analysis Update (IAU). Nevertheless the performance of the new version of PSY2 is not satisfactory in the Mediterranean Sea in the first 150m and a fresh bias is under investigation. Finally we present a preliminary intercomparison of a few physical processes viewed by the operational systems and by the IBI system at 1/36° horizontal resolution.