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Enrique Alvarez Fanjul¹
M.G. Sotillo ¹, A. Hines ², R. Proctor ³

(1) Area de Medio Fisico, Puertos del Estado (PdE), Madrid, Spain
(2) FOAM, Met Office, Exeter, UK
(3) Proudman Oceanography Laboratory (POL), Liverpool, UK

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The main objective of the ESEOO Project (Establecimiento de un Sistema Espanol de Oceanografia Operacional) is the promotion of Operational Oceanography in Spain, with particular focus on the development and implementation of products suitable for use in an emergency situation at sea such as an accidental oil spill. Within the project, regional ocean circulation forecast systems based on numerical modelling are being developed in order to provide predictions of a range of oceanographic variables within Spanish waters. Within this framework, the ESEOAT system, based on the POLCOMS model, provides coverage of the Atlantic Iberian waters. This paper describes the resulting operational system and the scientific developments made prior to the ESEOAT system implementation together with results from the validation of the model. To undertake the validation, hindcasts for the ESEOAT domain have been run for a 1-year period that runs from Sep 2002 to Aug 2003 and covers the /Prestige/ accident and the subsequent period of crisis. The ESEOAT hindcast performance has been comprehensively validated by means of comparisons of simulated variables such as sea surface temperature and currents against both satellite observations and in-situ measurements from offshore buoy stations. This hindcast exercise was repeated successively through a number of modifications to the set-up of the system. These modifications consist of: substitution of heat fluxes derived from bulk formulae with forcing directly provided by an atmospheric model; the implementation of a new re-start strategy based on an overlapping forecast cycle (as opposed to a single continuous "one-shot" hindcast run); and finally the inclusion of some bathymetric smoothing. Validation of the different hindcast test runs has allowed the quantification of the potential improvement introduced to the ESEOAT model system. The use of the "Prestige" year for these tests has provided a useful opportunity to validate the numerical simulations, as well as a realistic evaluation of the capabilities of the different set-ups with a view to development of a real-time operational oceanographic system.

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