North Atlantic Synthesis Group: Véronique Garçon¹, Hugh Ducklow², Mike Fasham³, Emilio Fernandez⁴, W. Glenn Harrison⁵, Wolfgang Koeve⁶, Roy Lowry⁷, Laurent Mémery⁸ and David Siegel⁹

¹LEGOS/CNRS, Toulouse, France, Tel: +33561332957, Fax: +33561253205, E-mail: veronique.garcon@cnes.fr, ²VIMS, Gloucester Point, USA, ³SOC/NERC, Southampton, UK, ⁴University of Vigo, Vigo, Spain, ⁵Bedford Institute of Oceanography, Dartmouth, Canada, ⁶MARUM, University of Bremen, Bremen, Germany, ⁷BODC, Prenton, UK, ⁸LODYC/CNRS, Paris, France and ⁹University of California, Santa Barbara, USA

Modelling and data assimilation in the North Atlantic: Towards GODAE

A major legacy of JGOFS is the hierarchy of mathematical models of variable complexity which emerged during the JGOFS decade to describe the oceanic carbon pump (production, transformation and sequestration). These models are based on the knowledge gained on the oceanic ecosystems through field work and ocean color satellites. We survey here, from the pioneering work of Fasham et al. (1990) at station S through the basin scale eddy resolving model of Oschlies (2002) until the global marine ecosystem mixed layer model of Moore et al. (2002) or Chu et al. (2002), the significant findings of the major modelling efforts in the North Atlantic. Furthermore, in situ and satellite data assimilation in coupled marine biogeochemistry modelling has made great progress and increases our confidence in the performance of the ecosystem models and consequently in their predictive capacities.