Atmospheric forcing as a driver for ocean forecasting

The connection of the ocean component with the Earth system is subject to the way the atmosphere interacts with it. The paper illustrates the state of the art in the way atmospheric fields are used in ocean models as boundary conditions for the provisioning of the exchanges of heat, freshwater, and momentum fluxes. Such fluxes are typically based on numerical weather prediction (NWP) systems which ingest observations from remote sensing and in situ instruments. This study also discusses how the ocean–atmosphere fluxes are numerically ingested in ocean models from global to regional to coastal scales. Today's research frontiers on this topic are opening challenging opportunities for developing more sophisticated coupled ocean–atmosphere systems and improved ocean–atmosphere flux datasets.