Barometric tides from ECMWF operational analyses

Author
Keywords
Abstract
The solar diurnal and semidiurnal tidal oscillations in surface pressure are extracted from the operational analysis product of the European Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasting (ECMWF). For the semidiurnal tide this involves a special temporal interpolation, following Van den Dool et al. (1997). The resulting tides are compared with a "ground truth" tide data set, a compilation of well-determined tide estimates deduced from many long time series of station barometer measurements. These comparisons show that the ECMWF (analysis) tides are significantly more accurate than the tides deduced from two other widely available reanalysis products. Spectral analysis of ECMWF pressure series shows that the tides consist of sharp central peaks with modulating sidelines at integer multiples of 1 cycle/year, superimposed on a broad cusp of stochastic energy. The integrated energy in the cusp dominates that of the side-lines. This complicates the development of a simple empirical model that can characterize the full temporal variability of the tides.
Year of Publication
2003
Journal
Annales Geophysicae
Volume
21
Number of Pages
1897-1910
Date Published
03/2003
DOI
10.5194/angeo-21-1897-2003
Download citation