Verification of the KMA Ocean Model NEMO against Argo Floats and Drift Buoys: a Comparison with the Up-to-date US Navy HYCOM

This paper describes verification results for the ocean analysis field produced by the Nucleus for European Modelling of the Ocean (NEMO) of the Korea Meteorological Administration (KMA) against observed Argo floats and drift buoys over the western Pacific Ocean and the equatorial Pacific during 2020-2021. This is confirmed by a comparison of the verification for the newly updated version of the HYbrid Coordinate Ocean Model/Navy Coupled Ocean Data Assimilation (HYCOM/NCODA) against same observations. NEMO shows that the vertical ocean temperature is much closer to the Argo floats than HYCOM for most seasons in terms of bias and root mean square error. On the other hand, there are overall considerable cold biases for HYCOM, which may be due to the more rapid decreasing temperature at the shallow thermocline in HYCOM. Conclusion demonstrated that the NEMO analysis for ocean temperature is more reliable than the analysis produced by the latest version of HYCOM as well as by the out-of-date HYCOM applied to the precedent study. The surface ocean current produced by NEMO also shows 14% closer to the AOML (Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory) in situ drift buoys observations than HYCOM over the western Pacific Ocean. Over the equatorial Pacific, however, HYCOM shows slightly closer to AOML observation than NEMO in some seasons. Overall, this study suggests that the resulting information may be used to promote more use of NEMO analysis.