State estimation improves prospects for ocean research

Rigorous global ocean state estimation methods can now be used to produce dynamically consistent time‐varying model/data syntheses, the results of which are being used to study a variety of important scientific problems. Figure 1 shows a schematic of a complete ocean observing and synthesis system that includes global observations and state‐of‐the‐art ocean general circulation models (OGCM) run on modern computer platforms. A global observing system is described in detail in Smith and Koblinsky [2001],and the present status of ocean modeling and anticipated improvements are addressed by Griffies et al. [2001]. Here, the focus is on the third component of state estimation: the synthesis of the observations and a model into a unified, dynamically consistent estimate.