Measuring Performances, Skill and Accuracy in Operational Oceanography: New Challenges and Approaches

Abstract

Operational oceanography is now established in many countries, focusing on global, regional, or coastal areas, and targeting different aspects of the « blue », « white » or « green » ocean processes in order to provide reliable information to users. There are nowadays a large variety of interests and users, with different disciplines and levels of expertise. Validation and verification of operational products and systems are evolving in order to anticipate user's needs, and better quantify the level of confidence on all these variety of ocean products. Operational oceanography evaluation development is in front of key issues: Ocean models are reaching the submesoscale description, which is currently not adequately observed; many products are available now for a given ocean variable, and often discrepancies are larger than similarities; real time forecasting systems are also challenged by reanalyses or reprocessed time series; operational systems are getting more complex, with coupled modelling, where errors from the different compartment need to be carefully addressed in order to measure their performance and provide further improvements. In parallel, the global ocean observing system is continuously completed with additional satellites in the constellation, with innovative sensors on new satellite missions, with efforts to better integrate the global, regional and coastal in-situ observing capabilities, and the design of new instrument, like the BGC-Argo that should bring an enhanced description of the ocean biogeochemical variability. This book chapter provides an overview of the existing, mature, validation and verification science in operational oceanography; discusses the ongoing efforts and new strategies; presents some of the structured groups and outcomes; and lists a series of challenges on the field.

Application of Earth Observation Data and Google Earth Engine for Monitoring Coral Reef Exposure to Environmental Stressors

“…Where available, the accuracy metric of the variables used for the CRSEI can be found in Supplementary Table S1. Satellite remote sensing data and ocean model data are now regularly available at resolutions of less than 10km [62]. Due to the relative sparseness of global in situ data, the ocean dynamics of some variables are not adequately observed at these fine scales, and, as such, error estimates for marine variables are not always available at a global scale, which is a common challenge for operational oceanography [62].…”

The Global High Frequency Radar Network

“…Complementarily, HFR systems play a primary role in multi-model comparison in overlapping regions since they help in judging the strengths and weaknesses of each forecasting system in the modeling of key ocean processes and also to deepen the understanding of discrepancies in model predictions. With CMEMS regional models special emphasis has been placed on the use of HFR measurements in the intercomparison of regional models against nested coastal model solutions in order to elucidate the added value of dynamical downscaling approaches (Hernandez et al, 2018).…”

Synergies in Operational Oceanography: The Intrinsic Need for Sustained Ocean Observations

“…Verification of ocean predictions has gradually evolved using metrics (Crosnier et al, 2006), defined as sets of diagnostics that compute scalar measures from ocean forecasting systems outcomes, providing not only objective quality indicators that can be quantitatively compared but also uncertainty estimates and error levels (Hernandez et al, 2015). These metrics allow for evaluation of the accuracy of ocean estimates, the forecast skill, and the reliability for use in services (Hernandez et al, 2009(Hernandez et al, , 2018. The metrics also establish if and how a new change in the model, data assimilation scheme or system setup has contributed to a better result and allow an ongoing monitoring of the quality of forecasts.…”