Pål Erik Isachsen (University of Oslo, Norway); Jonathan M. Lilly (Planetary Science Institute, USA); Marina Durán Moro (Norwegian Meteorological Institute, Norway); Martina Idžanovic (Norwegian Meteorological Institute, Norway); Antonio Bonaduce (NERSC, Norway)

The new Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) mission has marked a significant advancement in altimetry, demonstrating a substantial increase in resolution, capturing variability down to the submesoscale. What separates the SWOT mission from previous altimeters is its two-dimensional measurements of the sea surface. This offers a completely new dataset, where geostrophic velocities can be obtained in both directions. In this study, as part of the SWOT-NOR science team project, we use SWOT to look at the variability in the northern North Atlantic, including variance ellipses to assess the anisotropic part of the variability in surface geostrophic velocities. This has never been done along-track before, as previous altimeters only provided one-dimensional measurements. We use the operational ocean and sea-ice forecast model, Barents-2.5 to compare with SWOT sea surface height, geostrophic currents, and eddy kinetic energy in the Barents Sea and Svalbard region. This intercomparison study aims to evaluate the model’s bias relative to SWOT high-resolution observations, as a preparatory step toward its future assimilation into the operational forecasting system.