Observations

Wind Field on the SEACOOS domain

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Description

Coastal regions present a complex wind field structure, mainly due to irregular coastlines, boundary layer transitions and orography. Meteorological models are often too coarse to represent the small-scale variations in the wind field due to the presence of the coastline. However, there is a large number of buoys and coastal stations measuring winds in the Gulf of Mexico and Southeast US coast that are not presently assimilated into modeled wind fields. Using Optimal Interpolation to merge these two wind sources, a more realistic wind field is obtained for the coastal regions. In situ measurements (red arrows in the images displayed above) are obtained from the USF (http://comps.marine.usf.edu) and the NDBC (http://www.ndbc.noaa.gov/). The meteorological model used is the the NCEP Eta Data Assimilation System (EDAS, Kalnay et al, 1996). The merged wind fields (in blue) are used to force our hydrodynamical models, which show improved accuracy when using these OI wind fields (e.g. Barth et al (2007), He et al (2004)).

References:
Barth, A., Alvera-Azcárate, A. and R. H. Weisberg. Benefit of nesting a regional model into a large-scale ocean model instead of climatology. Application to the West Florida Shelf. Submitted to Continental Shelf Research.

He, R., Liu, Y. and Weisberg, R. H. 2004. Coastal Ocean wind fields gauged against the performance of an ocean circulation model. Geophysical Research Letters, 31, L14303.

Kalnay, E., Kanamitsu, M., Kistler, R., Collins, W., Deaven, D., Gandin, L., Iredell, M., Saha, S., White, G., Woollen, J., Zhu, Y., Chelliah, M., Ebisuzaki, W., Higgins, W., Janowiak, J., Mo, K.C., Ropelewski, C., Wang, J., Leetmaa, A., Reynolds, B., Jenne, R. and Joseph, D. 1996. Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, 77(3):437 - 471.