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Services | |
ESEOO Forecast | |
ESEOAT Zone | |
Technical Desccription of the ESEOO Forecast System:
ESEOAT Aplication
The ESEOO Forecast System consists on a set of different applications, which
objective is to produce a real-time short-term (72-hours) forecast of currents and other oceanographic variables, temperature and salinity among others, as well as to obtain a better understanding of the ocean dynamic
in the Spanish waters. The forecast system is based on the use of numerical models driven by meteorological and oceanographical forcing.
The regional ESEOAT application has been set-up to fulfil the objective of providing oceanographic forecast over the northwestern Atlantic area, closest to the Iberian Peninsula.
Currently, Puertos
del Estado is operationally running over this Atlantic domain an application based on the POLCOMS shelf-sea circulation model.
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| Geographical limits of the ESEOAT domain |
The POLCOMS circulation model
The POLCOMS model has been developed by the Proudman Oceanographic Laboratory (POL).
The model is a three-dimensional finite-difference primitive equations model formulated in spherical-polar co-ordinates on an Arakawa-B grid (Holt and James, 2001 and Holt et al., 2001).
The vertical is discretized into 34 S-levels. Incompressible, hidrostatic Boussinesq equations of motion are solved allowing time spliting between barotropic and baroclinic modes.
Both temperature and salinity are treated as prognostic variables.
For further information, go to the POLCOMS documentation:
http://cobs.pol.ac.uk/modl/metfcst/POLCOMS_DOCUMENTATION
The ESEOAT Application
The ESEOAT forecast is performed by means of an application based on the POLCOMS shelf-sea model,
running with a spatial resolution of 1/20° both in latitude and longitude (~ 4-5 km) and 34
S-levels in the vertical. Initial and boundary conditions, the later updated every 6 hours, are taken from the global model
FOAM. This forcing data is provided, once a day, by the Oceanographic Forecast Service of the
UK
MetOffice.
Likewise, the ESEOAT run is forced every 6 hours with atmospheric fields
(i.e. 10-m wind, surface preassure, 2-m temperature and relative humidity,
surface latent and sensible heat fluxes, as well as some other variables needed to calculate
surface radiative and hidric balances). The source of the needed atmospheric data is the
operational Forecast System, based on
the HIRLAM model,
of the Spanish Meteorological Service (Instituto Nacional de Meteorología, INM).
The model run is also forced with tides at the boundaries (14 harmonics), using for that
data provided by the Coastal Oceanography Observatoire Midi
Pirénées in collaboration with the Laboratoire d'Etudes en
Géophysique et Oceanographie Spatiales (LEGOS/POC)
(MOG2D model).
Additionally, the effect of fresh water river discharge is included in the ESEOAT run, using to this aim
climatological data of 14 fresh water river discharges, provided by the Global Runoff Data Center
(GRDC).
The following figure illustrates and summarizes the current scheme of the ESEOAT application developed by Puertos del Estado
