SalishSea_ColumbiaR_NOS_C

The Salish Sea and Columbia River Estuary Operational Forecast System (SSCOFS) was developed as a joint project of the NOAA/National Ocean Service's Center for Operational Oceanographic Products and Services (CO-OPS) and Office of Coast Survey, the NOAA/National Weather Service's (NWS) National Centers for Environmental Prediction Central Operations, the Battelle - Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), and the University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth. The SSCOFS model domain encompasses the Puget Sound, the San Juan Islands, the Strait of Georgia, and the Strait of Juan de Fuca, and extends south along the Pacific Coast to include the Columbia River. It is divided into 9 separate subdomains (San Juan Islands, Whidbey Basin, Central Puget Sound, Southern Puget Sound, Strait of Juan De Fuca, Columbia River Bar Entrance and Offshore Regions, Lower Columbia River, Middle Columbia River, and Upper Columbia River), allowing users to focus on their area of interest. SSCOFS uses the Finite-Volume, Coastal Ocean Model (FVCOM), and provides nowcast and forecast guidance of water levels, currents, water temperature, and salinity out to 72 hours, 4 times a day. The model relies on the National Water Model output for the river forcing, ADCIRC (ENPAC2015) for the tidal forcing and the Global Real-Time Ocean Forecast System (G-RTOFS) for the subtidal water level, water temperature and salinity profile along open boundaries. The SSCOFS grid has 239,734 nodes and 433,410 elements. The vertical grid follows the terrain and consists of 10 spatially varying sigma-layers. The model has an unstructured triangular grid. The resolution varies from ~ 100 m along the shoreline to 500 m in deeper parts of Puget Sound and the Georgia Basin, and increases to 10,000 m over the continental shelf. Resolution in the Columbia River varies between 100 and 200 m. SSCOFS replaced the CREOFS model.

NCOM_Alaska

The U.S. Navy Coastal Ocean Model (NCOM) was developed by the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) and is maintained by the U.S. Navy Fleet Numerical Meteorology and Oceanography Center (FNMOC).

GIOPS_C

The Global Ice Ocean Prediction System (GIOPS) provides global ice and ocean analyses and 10 day forecasts daily at 00GMT on a 1/4° resolution grid. The model has 50 levels ranging from 1 m to 250 m thickness at depth. GIOPS includes a full multivariate ocean data assimilation system that combines satellite observations of sea level anomaly and sea surface temperature (SST) together with in situ observations of temperature and salinity. In situ observations are obtained from a variety of sources including: the Argo network of autonomous profiling floats, moorings, ships of opportunity, marine mammals and research cruises. Ocean analyses are blended with sea ice analyses that combine satellite retrievals of sea ice concentration with Daily Ice Charts and RADARSAT image analyses produced by the Canadian Ice Service. Atmospheric fluxes for 10 day forecasts are calculated using fields from the Global Deterministic Prediction System. Ice and ocean forecast and analysis products from GIOPS are: sea surface height (m), water temperature (°C), water salinity (psu), currents (m/s), sea ice fraction (%), snow depth on sea ice (m), ice thickness (m), ice drift velocity (m/s), Ice pressure (N/m).

StJDeFuca_tides_ASA

Prince William Sound and SE Alaska tidal models are continuously nested square grid vertically averaged hydrodynamic models. Straits of Juan de Fuca; San Francisco Bay, and Narragansett Bay use curvilinear boundary fitted coordinate hydrodynamic model. All the models solve the three-dimensional conservation equations in spherical coordinates for water mass, density, and momentum across all levels of spatial resolution at each time step and are depth averaged tidal currents (100% of the local water depth). A quadratic stress law, based on the local bottom terrain, is used to represent frictional dissipation. The model forcing functions consist of surface elevations along the open boundaries. The tidal forcing for the 6 major harmonic constituents (M2, S2, N2, K1, O1 and P1), derived from the Global Ocean Tidal Model (TPOX71) developed at the Oregon State University was applied along the offshore open boundary.

RIOPS_C

The Regional Ice-Ocean Prediction System (RIOPS) runs at the Canadian Centre for Meteorological and Environmental Prediction (CCMEP). RIOPS is based on the NEMO-CICE ice-ocean model and produces regional sea ice and ocean 84-hours forecasts 4 times a day based at [00, 06, 12, 18] UTC on a subset of the 1/12° resolution global tri-polar grid. The RIOPSv2 domain extends from 26°N in the Atlantic Ocean through the Arctic Ocean to 44° N in the Pacific Ocean, with a model grid-resolution that varies between 3 and 8 km and 5 km resolution at the standard parallel 60°N. RIOPS is now initialized using its own multivariate analysis that has been adapted to accommodate the inclusion of tides in RIOPS. RIOPS analyses have been shown to provide a more accurate representation of mesoscale eddies as compared to the Global Ice Ocean Prediction System (GIOPS). Specific improvements are found in the vicinity of the Gulf Stream for all model fields due to the higher model grid-resolution, with smaller root-mean-squared (RMS) innovations for RIOPSv2 of about 5 cm for SLA and 0.5°C for SST. Bathymetry is based on ETOPO2 (Amante and Eakins, 2009). Tidal variations in sea surface height (SSH) and barotropic transport are applied along the open boundaries in the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans using 13 tidal constituents (M2, S2, N2, K2, O1, K1, Q1, P1, M4, Mf, Mm, Mn4, Ms4) extracted from the Oregon State University product (Egbert and Erofeeva, 2002).

WCOFS_NOS_C

A three-dimensional U.S. West Coast Operational Forecast System (WCOFS) has been developed to serve the maritime user community. WCOFS was developed in a joint project of the NOAA/National Ocean Service (NOS)/Office of Coast Survey, the NOAA/NOS/Center for Operational Oceanographic Products and Services (CO-OPS), and the NOAA/National Weather Service (NWS)/National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP) Central Operations (NCO) using Rutgers University's Regional Ocean Modeling System (ROMS). WCOFS generates water level, current, temperature and salinity nowcast and forecast guidance four times per day. The WCOFS domain encompasses the entire west coast from California to Washington and extends offshore for more than 1000 km. The model grid has 348x1016 points in the horizontal with grid resolution of about 4 km. The vertical grid follows the terrain and consists of 40 levels. The WCOFS has three open-ocean boundaries (north, south and west). NCEP's Global Real Time Ocean Forecast System (RTOFS) is used to provide open boundary conditions for non-tidal water level, temperature, salinity, and non-tidal depth integrated currents. Tidal currents and water level are constructed from Oregon State University's TPXO8 tidal database. Temperature and salinity within a 100km zone along the open boundary are also nudged towards RTOFS temperature and salinity fields. The WCOFS nowcast/forecast starts with analysis from a 3-day data assimilation window. ROMS's four dimensional variational data assimilation (4DVAR) methodology is used to improve the initial conditions of the ocean state. In 4DVar, data collected over the assimilation window and corresponding to any modeled field contribute to changes in all forecasted fields. Particularly relevant observations for ocean currents are derived from estimated surface currents from the National High Frequency Radar (HFR) network and absolute dynamic topography (ADT) from satellites Jason 3, Sentinel 3, Cryosat 2, and SARAL/Altika.

AGG_ADCIRC_GHycom_C

Since NCEP Global HYCOM does not contain tides and ADCIRC is strictly tidal currents, these two can be combined together to add tides to global HYCOM (NCEP) currents in the near-shore regions. ADCIRC tidal current vectors are vectors added to the global HYCOM non-tidal currents.