Estimating the Circulation & Climate of the Ocean
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  THE ECCO CONSORTIUM
 

ECCO was established in 1998 as part of the World Ocean Circulation Experiment (WOCE) with the goal of combining a general circulation model (GCM) with diverse observations in order to produce a quantitative depiction of the time-evolving global ocean state. The importance of such an endeavor is recognized by numerous national and international organizations, such as the WMO's World Climate Research Programme (WCRP) and UNESCO's Intergovernmental Oceanographic Comission (IOC). These programs have all noted the necessity of synthesizing the diverse remotely-sensed and in-situ observations with known dynamics and thermodynamics through a GCM. ECCO products are in support of the Climate Variability and Predictability (CLIVAR) programme and the Global Ocean Data Assimilation Experiment (GODAE).
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ECCO PRODUCTS ECCO'S GENERAL CIRCULATION MODEL AUTOMATIC/ALGORITHMIC
DIFFERENTIATION (AD)

ECCO products as well as input fields and quality-controlled observations are freely available from several data servers through various applications (including DODS/OPeNDAP, LAS, GDS, Dapper, SRB, Ingrid).
A summary of available ECCO products and data servers can be found here.

The ECCO code is based on the MIT general circulation model (MITgcm), a numerical model designed for study of the atmosphere, ocean, and climate. It comes with a variety of packages including physical parameterizations, a sea-ice model, biochemical components, and allows flexible porting across various HPC platforms.
For more details on the MITgcm click here.
Since the mid-1990's, groups at MIT, SIO, JPL and GFDL have applied automatic/algorithmic differentiation (AD) tools for generating tangent linear and adjoint code for ocean circulation and climate studies. ECCO relies heavily on the AD tool TAMC and its commecial successor TAF. The ECCO group is also involved in the development of a new open-source AD tool OpenAD.
More details can be found here.
     
  IN THE NEWS  
 


August 2009: Editors' Highlight in GRL

Work by R.M. Ponte and K.J. Quinn on Bottom pressure changes around Antarctica and wind-driven meridional flows was picked as Editors' Highight in the Geophysical Research Letters' recent volume 36..


June 2009: A new ECCO-GODAE solution

The MIT/AER ECCO-GODAE project issued a new solution of its recent version 3 system. The new solution uses atmospheric state fields as control variables in conjunction with an adjoint of the Large and Yeager surface boundary layer scheme, as well as a dynamic/thermodynamical sea-ice model. The solution has been update through the end of 2007 (calculations through end of 2008 are under way). The new solution is available via ECCO's LAS server at MIT.

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Estimating the Circulation & Climate of the Ocean