NASA’s Estimating the Circulation and Climate of the Ocean (ECCO) project supports climate research by providing the scientific community with the best possible multidecadal reconstructions of Earth’s time-evolving full-depth ocean, sea-ice, and atmospheric surface states and their associated fluxes.
ECCO state estimate are multi-platform, multi-instrument, multi-variable synthesis products that integrate global satellite and in-situ ocean and ice observations with coupled ocean/sea-ice models. By construction, ECCO state estimates satisfy the laws of physics and thermodynamics and therefore conserve heat, salt, volume, and momentum. This strict adherence to conservation principles makes ECCO products particularly well-suited for investigations into the origins of observed ocean, sea-ice, and sea-level variability.
Through these and other examples, the ongoing production of ECCO state estimates furthers NASA’s strategic goal to “advance understanding of Earth” by “tracking and characterizing the mechanisms of environmental change.”
Learn more at https://ecco-group.org
The latest ECCO “Central Estimate” product (Version 4, Release 4) is comprised of 100+ 3D, 2D, and 1D ocean, sea-ice, and atmospheric surface parameters. These 100+ parameters are grouped into 25+ datasets and provided as both daily and monthly averages on two spatial grids: a 1/2° regular latitude-longitude grid and the “lat-lon-cap 90” (llc90) native model grid. Select parameters are also provided as 1D global-mean time series. Finally, a subset of 3D and 2D parameters are provided as “instantaneous snapshots” to support closed budget analyses. The complete ECCO V4r4 product exceeds 3TB across more than 385,000 granules.
