CoAuthors

Jerome Chanut (mercator ocean, France); Loren Carrere (CLS, France); Florent Lyard (Legos, France); Benoit Tranchant (CLS, France); Yann Drillet (mercator ocean, France)

In the framework of Copernicus Marine environment monitoring service, Mercator Ocean, the French center for ocean forecasting, develops and operates several operational forecasting systems (a model based on NEMO ocean code with an assimilation system). Over the past years, Mercator Ocean has been regularly upgrading its global systems through improvements in the ocean model, assimilation scheme and assimilated data sets. The next step discussed in this work, is the explicit representation of tidal motions. This adds an important source of mixing over the shelves and a significant contribution to the simulated internal wave spectrum, all of which presumably bringing the model solution closer to the real world.
In this study, global tidal solutions discretized on 1/4° and 1/12° grids, are validated thanks to an exhaustive observational dataset. These are also compared to the harmonic solutions of different simulations dedicated to the simulation of barotropic tides. The sensitivity to the temporal scheme, to the formulation of the Self attraction and loading effect and horizontal resolution are presented and discussed. Finally, a strategy to constrain the tidal model solution towards global data assimilative models is proposed.