High-Resolution Regional Ocean Climatologies with the Northwest Atlantic as an Example: A Review

Abstract

The advantages of high-resolution oceanographic data analysis stems from an increased ability to capture sharp gradients in frontal zones and across mesoscale entities, especially in the coastal regions and along ocean jet-like currents, relative to coarser resolution analyses. In a sense, the finer-resolution analysis pursues the same goal as the usage of progressively reduced grid sizes in succeeding from coarse-resolution to eddy-permitting and then to eddy-resolving in numerical models of ocean circulation. Thus, the high-resolution regional climatologies are now closing the gaps existing between observations and model simulations allowing meaningful data-model comparisons in critical data-rich regions, such as the Northwestern Atlantic, Northeast Pacific Ocean, and several others. In this paper, we briefly review the locations, timing, purpose, and specificity of the regional ocean climatologies developed at the National Center for Environmental Information of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. We describe the Northwestern Atlantic Regional Climatology, version 2 in more details and demonstrate how this regional climatology contributes to a better understanding of the long-term climate state and variability