RAPID - Round 2 - Assimilation in ocean and coupled models to determine the thermohaline circulation Project

Introduction

To make the best use of the historical research ship records as well as new observations from autonomous ocean profiling floats and special observing programs such as Rapid climate change, it is proposed to assimilate all of the available data from the past 40 years into a high quality ocean circulation model that can represent complete fields of ocean properties. In this way derived quantities such as the north-south mass and heat transports which are vital to understanding the oceans role in controlling climate, can also be determined. The project will also put into context the various timeseries of observations that have been compiled from local regions which suggest that important changes in ocean circulation and transports have been ongoing in the past decades. These timeseries will thus be put into a basin scale and global scale context of ongoing change. The program will determine the relationship between hydrographic signals in different parts of the ocean basins (particularly the N Atlantic). The program will also provide a method for assimilating data from the thermohaline monitoring arrays into an ocean model that could then be used as part of a coupled climate model for multi-annual climate prediction.

Project Duration: 1 Sep 2005 - 30 Sep 2009

This project is funded by NERC - Lead Grant Ref. NE/C509058/1 - through the RAPID Climate Change NERC directed mode programme.

Access to data and information

Data and software supplied from this project to the BADC will be stored in the BADC RAPID archive.

Access to the archive is currently restricted to participants to this particular project. If you are a programme participant and would like to access this RAPID project data, then please apply for access^* to the RAPID data.

You will be requested to abide by the RAPID Climate Change Data Policy.
Data management, availability and use are ruled by the RAPID Climate Change Programme Data Management Plan (PDF document).
Access to Hadley Centre model data held at the BADC is subject to the signature of the NERC-Met Office agreement.

^* Note that to apply for access to this dataset, you should first register as a BADC user (anyone is allowed to register). If you are already a registered BADC user, skip this step. If you have forgotten your BADC user ID and/or password, please contact the BADC helpdesk at badc@rl.ac.uk. To register as a new BADC user, please follow the instructions online.

Citation

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Who to contact

This RAPID project is led by Prof Keith Haines of the University of Reading, with co-investigators at the National Oceanography Centre.

General queries about these pages or browsing the data should be directed to the BADC Support line.

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