Abstract
This study investigates the accuracy of short-term ocean predictions during the development of ocean stratification for the Korea Meteorological Administration (KMA) Global Seasonal Forecast System version 5 (GloSea5) as well as the effect of atmosphere-ocean coupling on the predictions through a series of sensitive numerical experiments. Model performance is evaluated using the marine meteorological buoys at seas around the Korean peninsular (KP), Tropical Atmosphere Ocean project (TAO) buoys over the tropical Pacific ocean, and ARGO floats data over the western North Pacific for boreal winter (February) and spring (May). Sensitive experiments are conducted using an ocean-atmosphere coupled model (i.e., GloSea5) and an uncoupled ocean model (Nucleus for European Modelling of the Ocean, NEMO) and their results are compared. The verification results revealed an overall good performance for the SST predictions over the tropical Pacific ocean and near the Korean marginal seas, in which the Root Mean Square Errors (RMSE) were $0.31{\sim}0.45^{\circ}C$ and $0.74{\sim}1.11^{\circ}C$ respectively, except oceanic front regions with large spatial and temporal SST variations (the maximum error reached up to $3^{\circ}C$). The sensitive numerical experiments showed that GloSea5 outperformed NEMO over the tropical Pacific in terms of bias and RMSE analysis, while NEMO outperformed GloSea5 near the KP regions. These results suggest that the atmosphere-ocean coupling substantially influences the short-term ocean forecast over the tropical Pacific, while other factors such as atmospheric forcing and the accuracy of simulated local current are more important than the coupling effect for the KP regions being far from tropics during the development of ocean stratification.
