[23-May-2017] Bayler, E., Osychny, V., Chawla, A., and Mehra, A.
Presented at the Global Ocean Salinity and the Water Cycle WorkshopThe assimilation of sea-surface salinity (SSS) data into numerical prediction models serves to extract value from the observations, as well as integrates those observations with other data to produce an optimal output. Sea-surface salinity observations from the European Space Agency's (ESA) Soil Moisture-Ocean Salinity (SMOS) mission and the National Aeronautics and Space Agency's (NASA) Soil Moisture Active-Passive mission are now sufficiently mature for assimilation into NOAA's operational models, in particular the Real-time Ocean Forecast System (RTOFS) and the Global Ocean Data Assimilation System (GODAS), the ocean component of NOAA's operational Climate Forecast System (CFS). The development of operational SSS data assimilation has now commenced full time. NOAA is operationally implementing the Navy Coupled Ocean Data Assimilation (NCODA) system; consequently, NCODA's SSS capability will be fully developed/refined and implemented. The development path is discussed.