Climatology and interannual variability of the North Atlantic from Coriolis re-analysis.

E. Autret (1), F. Gaillard (1), T. Loubrieu (2)

1.Laboratoire de Physique des Océans, Ifremer, BP70, 29280 Plouzané France
2.Coriolis data center, Ifremer, BP70, 29280 Plouzané France

Coriolis real time analysis system started operating in 2000 over the North-Atlantic. The dataset collected in real time and delayed mode during this 5 years period has been revisited an a re-analysis has been produced with the same analysis system. Temperature and salinity fields are reconstructed on a 1/3 degree grid, on more than 50 levels from surface down to 2000 m .
>From these fields, associated errors and datasets, we have computed a new climatology representative of the 2000-2004 period, along with updated elementary statistics. The use for those basic products is wide, ranging from automatic quality control to the tuning of numerical models.
The seasonal to interannual variability of the various region of the basin has been examined, and it appears that some long term signal is detected. Given the actual observing system, these products could easily been updated on an annual basis and extended to the world ocean.
The dataset allows also for estimation of higher order statistics. The large scale horizontal structure of the variability is extracted with principal component analysis while the more homogeneous meso-scale are described by the usual horizontal covariances.