CERA-20C is a coupled reanalysis of the twentieth century which aims to reconstruct the past weather and climate of the Earth system including the atmosphere, ocean, land, ocean waves, and sea ice. This reanalysis is based on the CERA coupled atmosphere-ocean assimilation system developed at ECMWF. CERA-20C provides a 10 member ensemble of reanalyses to account for errors in the observational record as well as model error. It benefited from the prior experience of the retrospective atmospheric analysis ERA-20C. The dynamical model and the data assimilation systems initially developed for NWP had been modified to take into account the evolution of the radiative forcing and the observing system. To limit the impact of changes in the observing system throughout the century, only conventional surface observations have been used in the atmosphere. CERA-20C improves the specification of the background and the observation errors, two key elements to ensure a consistent weighting of the uncertainties across geophysical variables, space, and time. The quality of CERA-20C has been evaluated against other centennial reanalyses and independent observations. Although CERA-20C inherits some limitations of ERA-20C to represent correctly the tropical cyclones in the first part of the century, it shows significant improvements in the troposphere, compared to ERA-20C and 20CRv2c (the twentieth century reanalysis produced by NOAA/CIRES). A preliminary study of the climate variability in CERA-20C has been carried out. CERA-20C improves on the representation of atmosphere-ocean heat fluxes and mean sea level pressure compared to previous uncoupled ocean and atmospheric historical reanalyses performed at ECMWF.

[1] Combining hydrographic data from the OVIDE (Observatoire de la Variabilité Interannuelle à Decennale/Observatory of the Interannual to Decadal Variability) section (Greenland-Portugal) with Argo and historical CTD data over the period 1990-2006, we estimate the variability of the core properties of a variety of Subpolar Mode Water (SPMW) observed on the eastern flank of the Reykjanes Ridge. This SPMW acquires its core properties in the winter mixed layer along the eastern side of the Reykjanes Ridge. We find that the February sea surface temperature along the ridge is a proxy for its core temperature. The sources of this mode water are water masses advected by the mean cyclonic circulation in the Iceland Basin. A density compensated tendency for cooling and freshening of the SPMW core properties is observed in the early 1990s. It stops in 1996 and is followed by an increase in temperature and salinity (+1.41°C and +0.11 psu) and a decrease in density (À0.12 kg m À3 ) until at least 2003. During the entire period, the data do not show any significant modification in the depth of the mode water core while they suggest that the thickness of the layer shrank. The variability of the local air-sea freshwater and heat fluxes cannot explain the observed salinity and temperature variations. They are most likely related to the modifications of the properties of the SPMW sources due to the recently evidenced changes, driven by the North Atlantic Oscillation, in the relative contributions of subtropical waters and subpolar waters in the Iceland Basin.