Indications of improved seasonal sea level forecasts for the United States Gulf Coast and East Coast using ocean dynamic persistence

Abstract

Forecasting seasonal sea levels along many coasts remains challenging, with generally lower skills than forecasts for the open oceans. We investigate the influence of ocean dynamics on forecasting monthly sea level anomalies for the United States Gulf Coast and East Coast using the Estimating Circulation and Climate of the Ocean (ECCO) system, which is initialized monthly from 1992 through 2017 and runs forward for 12 months under climatological atmospheric forcing. This approach, which we refer to as an ocean dynamic persistence forecast, demonstrates improved skill compared to both observed damped persistence and the ECMWF SEAS5 climate forecast system when evaluated against observations. At a lead of 4 months, dynamic persistence has the highest anomaly correlation coefficients at 22 out of 39 coastal locations (mostly south of Cape Hatteras). However, improvement in root mean square error is minimal, possibly due to reduced variability in ECCO associated with its climatology forcing and coarse resolution. This study suggests that dynamic persistence offers the potential to improve sea level forecasts beyond the capabilities of damped persistence and a state-of-the-art climate model.

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