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FOAM is an ocean and sea-ice model and assimilation system
that produces real-time daily analyses and forecasts of temperature,
salinity, currents and sea-ice in the deep ocean, for up to five
days ahead.
The original FOAM system was introduced in 1997, and has subsequently
evolved to better meet ocean forecasting requirements. Supported
by an active research and development programme, FOAM is at the
forefront of the development of operational forecasting of the
deep ocean.
FOAM is built around nested physically based ocean and sea-ice
models. It is driven by six-hourly mean surface fluxes from the
Met Office's operational numerical weather prediction (NWP) system
and assimilates ocean observations (in situ and remotely sensed)
that are available in near real-time. Observations, from the previous
10 days, are assimilated with variable weighting.
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The FOAM system is fully relocatable, allowing high-resolution
configurations to be set up for any deep ocean region, and
includes:
- an ocean model based on the Bryan-Cox code (the same
code is used by the Hadley Centre for coupled climate
simulations and also for coupled seasonal forecasting);
- a sea-ice model to predict sea-ice thickness, concentration
and velocities;
- assimilation of temperature and salinity profiles (BATHYs
and TESACs) including data from the Argo profiling floats
and the TAO/TRITON and PIRATA moored arrays;
- regional configurations of FOAM also assimilate sea-surface
height data from satellite altimeters such as Jason-1;
- assimilation of ship, buoy and satellite (AVHRR) sea-surface
temperature reports;
- assimilation of sea-ice concentration fields received
from the Canadian Meteorological Centre.
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More
about the FOAM system
List of publications
by the FOAM team
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