NY_Hrbr_NOS

NOS runs Operational Forecast Systems for Chesapeake Bay; Delaware Bay; Tampa Bay; St. Johns River; and New York and New Jersey harbor regions. These 3-D ROMS numerical models include ADCIRC tides and global HYCOM (NCEP) temperatures and salinities at the outer boundaries; river flow (USGS stream gage for nowcast and persisting the most recent observation for the forecast period); and wind forcing is from hourly surface wind analysis from NCEP for the nowcast and NAM for the forecasted periods. NOS Operational Forecast system models’ horizontal and vertical grid cell sizes and minimum and maximum surface layer thickness are summarized in Table 5.

Maine_FVCOM_UMass_C

Finite Volume Community Ocean Model (FVCOM) covers the coastal waters extending from the Delmar peninsula northeast to the northeast tip of Nova Scotia. FVCOM Maine uses an unstructured grid in the horizontal and a sigma coordinate with 41 layers in the vertical. The horizontal resolution ranges from ~200 m in Nantucket Sound to a maximum of 10-20 km along the open boundary in the deep ocean off Georges Bank. FVCOM Maine uses a hybrid vertical coordinate system. In water depths shallower than 200 meters, the thickness of the top layer is equal to the ratio of local water depth to the total number of vertical layers, which ranges from 5 m at a depth of 200 m to 0.5 m or less in the region with the water depth of 20 m or shallower. The model time step is 240 seconds. The surface wind forcing is predicted using a regional mesoscale weather model (WRF/NAM) with 9 x 9 km spacing. FVCOM Maine includes a surface wave forecast (significant wave height and peak period) in addition to the surface elevation and 3D currents, temperature and salinity forecast. The freshwater inflow from 46 major rivers are specified along the coastline. FVCOM Maine is run as part of the NERACOOS Northeast Coastal Ocean Forecast System (NECOFS) produced by the Marine Ecosystem Dynamics Modeling Laboratory (MEDML) at the School for Marine Science and Technology, University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth.

STOFS_ATL_C

The Surge and Tide Operational Forecast System 3D component for the Northwest Atlantic basin (STOFS-3D-Atlantic), covers the U.S. East Coast, Gulf of Mexico, Puerto Rico, and the Gulf of St. Lawrence. STOFS-3D-Atlantic utilizes the Semi-implicit Cross-scale Hydroscience Integrated System Model (SCHISM) as its hydrodynamic modeling core. Its unstructured grid comprises 2,926,236 nodes and 5,654,157 triangular or quadrilateral elements, with resolutions ranging from 1.5–2 km near the shoreline, ~600 m in floodplains, down to 8 m in watershed rivers, and 2–10 m along levees. The landward boundary of the domain along the U.S. coastline corresponds to the 10-m contour above xGEOID20B, encompassing the coastal transition zone most susceptible to coastal and inland flooding. Vertical grid layers vary from 49 in the deepest parts of the Atlantic Ocean to a single layer in floodplain areas. The water levels generated by STOFS-3D-Atlantic represent the combined tidal and subtidal water surface elevations, all referenced to xGEOID20B. The STOFS-3D-Atlantic system provides users with 24-hour nowcasts and up to 96-hour forecast guidance for water level conditions, along with two- and three-dimensional fields of water temperature, salinity, and currents. It operates once daily at 12 UTC.

NCOM_USec

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).