No_GoMex_FVCOM_NOS2_C

The new Northern Gulf of Mexico Operational Forecast System (NGOFS2) is run by National Ocean Service (NOS) on NOAA’s Weather Climate Operational Supercomputing System (WCOSS). NGOFS2 integrates the existing Northern Gulf of Mexico (NGOFS), Northeastern Gulf of Mexico (NEGOFS), and Northwestern Gulf of Mexico (NWGOFS) into one model grid and extends the model domain to the Mexico border and into the Mississippi River up to Baton Rouge and east to Panama City. NGOFS2 uses the same Finite Volume Community Ocean Model (FVCOM) developed jointly by the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution as used by the existing NGOFS, NEGOFS, and NWGOFS. FVCOM is a prognostic, unstructured-grid, finite-volume, free-surface, 3-D primitive equation coastal ocean circulation model with a horizontal grid comprised of unstructured triangular cells and the irregular bottom is presented using generalized terrain-following coordinates. NGOFS2 operates within the NOS Coastal Ocean Modeling Framework (COMF) and will have the same four daily nowcast and forecast cycles as NGOFS at 03, 09, 15, and 21 UTC. NGOFS2 bathymetry has a minimum depth of 1.0 m and maximum depth of 1750.3 m. The unstructured triangular grid has 303,714 nodes and 569,405 elements. The horizontal triangular grid size ranges from 45 m to 10 km, with higher resolution located in tidal creeks, inlets connecting bay with coastal ocean, and intracoastal waterways and coarser resolution along the open boundary. The model has 41 uniform sigma levels in vertical. In water depths shallower than 200 meters, the thickness of the top layer equal to the ratio of local water depth to a total number of vertical layers, which ranges from about 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 meteorological forcing for the nowcast and forecast cycles is provided by the NWS 12 km resolution North American Mesoscale (NAM) weather prediction model. Non-tidal water levels and thirty seven tidal constituents along the open boundary are interpolated from NWS Global Real-Time Ocean Forecast System (G-RTOFS) and the Advanced Circulation Model (ADCIRC) ec2001 tidal database, respectively. The temperature and salinity along the open boundary are interpolated from the G-RTOFS forecast guidance. The river forcing is provided by USGS Real-time river discharge observations for nowcast cycles, the last observed discharges are persisted for forecast cycles.

TWDB_MAG

Texas Water Development Board (TWDB), in partnership with the Texas General Land Office (TGLO) Oil Spill Prevention and Response effort, maintains near real-time and forecast simulations of water circulation in the major bays for use in the event that an oil spill occurs within Texas bays. For bays with heavy ship traffic, these models quickly provide information to TGLO responders on the potential path of an oil spill by predicting water current direction and speed throughout the bay. TWDB has models for Sabine Lake, Galveston Bay, Matagorda Bay, Corpus Christi Bay, and San Antonio Bay. The TWDB Hydrodynamic and salinity model (TxBLEND) is a computer model designed to simulate water circulation and salinity conditions in estuaries. The model is based on the finite element method, employs triangular elements with linear basis functions, and simulates movements in two horizontal dimensions.

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.

TAMU_TX_LA_C

The Texas-Louisiana Regional Ocean Forecast System (TXLA ROFS) has been developed by a research group at Texas A&M University. The aim is to provide near-real-time ocean forecast data to various stakeholders for different purposes, but primarily for oil spill responses. The forecast and nowcast are based on Regional Ocean Modeling System (ROMS), which is a hydrostatic primitive equation ocean model. The domain covers the entire Texas- Louisiana Shelf and shelf slopes. The model uses a curvilinear grid stretching along the coastline of Texas and Louisiana horizontally and terrain-following stretching coordinate (s-coordinate) vertically. The finest horizontal resolution is approximately 650 m and the coarsest resolution is approximately 3.7 km. The number of vertical layers is 30 and more layers are concentrated near the surface and bottom to ensure the adequate number of layers in the surface and bottom boundary layers. It includes streamflow of 9 rivers across Texas and Louisiana including the Mississippi and Atchafalaya rivers to accurately represent the plume from the rivers. Tides are not included. The TXLA ROFS system runs daily on Texas A&M high-performance computing clusters (HPCs). TXLA ROFS is forced by NOAA's GFS, Global HYCOM provides open boundary conditions and the National Water Model provides the streamflow. TXLA ROFS generates 1-day nowcast and 4-day forecast outputs at 1-hour intervals. The primary output variables include sea surface height, u, v, temperature, and salinity. The product is funded by the Texas General Land Office.