State-of-the- art ocean general circulation models and Earth system models tend to disagree widely in their assessment of the physical state and biogeochemistry in the Southern Ocean due to their sensitivity to domain configuration, choice of initial conditions, internal parameterizations, and atmospheric state, all of which are poorly constrained by observations. State estimation provides a means to bring a numerical model into consistency with the available data, producing a hindcast of the ocean state that is dynamically consistent and that has closed budgets for carbon and other biogeochemical tracers.
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