Pre-operational short-term forecasts for the Mediterranean Sea biogeochemistry
Abstract. Operational prediction of the marine environment is recognised as a fundamental research issue for Europe. We present a pre-operational implementation of a biogeochemical model for pelagic waters of the Mediterranean Sea, as developed within the framework of the MERSEA-IP European project. The OPATM-BFM coupled model is the core of a fully automatic system that weekly delivers analysis and forecast maps for the Mediterranean Sea biogeochemistry. The system in the present configuration has been working since April 2007 with successful execution of the fully automatic operational chain in the 87% of the cases, and in the remaining cases the runs were successfully accomplished after operator intervention. A description of the system developed and a comparison of the model results with satellite data are also presented, with Spearman correlation on surface chlorophyll temporal evolution equal to 0.71. Future studies will be addressed to the implementations of a data assimilation scheme for the biogeochemical compartment in order to increase the skill of the model performances.