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Introduction

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17	17	= Introduction =
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	19	The NEMO ocean engine [Madec 2008] was previously known as the OPA model [Madec et al. 1998]. It used to have a TAM (called OPATAM), fully hand-coded and maintained mainly by A. Weaver. OPATAM was initially developed for a Paciﬁc ocean conﬁguration, and targeted at variational data assimilation applications in the framework of OPAVAR [Weaver et al. 2003, 2005]. OPATAM/OPAVAR were extended to other regional basins (Mediterranean sea [Rémy 1999], North Atlantic 1/3° [Forget et al. 2008], South Atlantic 1° ), to the global ocean (ORCA 2° [Daget et al. 2009]), and were used for methodological studies such as control of the 3D model error [Vidard 2001], control of the surface forcing and open boundary conditions [Deltel 2002, Vossepoel et al. 2003]. OPATAM was also used for sensitivity studies [Sévellec et al. 2008], singular vectors [Moore et al. 2003, Sévellec et al. 2009], etc.
	20	For several reasons, mainly because of lack of workforce, OPATAM, OPAVAR and related developments were not included in the standard release of OPA. As a consequence, synchronisation of OPATAM with OPA’s releases could not be achieved on a regular basis, and all developments were on individual branches, without feedback to the OPATAM/OPAVAR system. The pool of potential users was reduced consequently. It is important not to repeat this error in the future, so as to ensure that NEMOTAM become a widely used community tool.