Ocean Circulation Hindcast at the Brazilian Equatorial Margin

The growth of the activities of the Petroleum Industry in the Brazilian Equatorial Margin, reinforces the need for the environmental knowledge of the region, which will be potentially exposed to risks related to such activities. The environmental importance of this region evidences the need to deepen and systematize not only the knowledge about the environmental sensitivity of the region, but also about the characteristics that will exert influence over it. The Costa Norte Project can be identified with one of these initiatives. The project has as one of the main objectives to evaluate the efficiency of the use of marine hydrodynamic environmental computational modeling methods to represent the marine dynamics over that region. In this paper a regional ocean computational model was used to produce an inedited ten year hindcast simulation in order to represent the main aspects associated with mesoscale climatological ocean circulation at the Brazilian equatorial margin. This article aims to present the methodology and the results analysis and evaluation associated to the cited hydrodynamic computational simulation. The obtained results clearly demonstrated the ocean model potential to represent the most important ocean variables space and time distribution over the studied region. Comparative analysis with observed data demonstrated good agreement with temperature, salinity and sea surface height fields generated by the implemented model. The Costa Norte Project is carrying out under the Brazilian National Petroleum Agency (ANP) R&D levy as “Investment Commitment to Research and Development” and is financially supported by Enauta O&G company.