Assessing the Impact of GODAE Boundary Conditions on the Estimate and Prediction of the Monterey Bay and California Central Coast Circulation

The practical demonstration of basin-scale ocean state estimation has been realized through the Global Ocean Data Assimilation Experiment (GODAE) whose projects provide complete descriptions of the temperature, salinity, and velocity structure of the global ocean. The ocean circulation, temperature and salinity distributions of coastal regions are characterized by smaller scale processes typically not resolved by basin-scale estimates of the ocean structure. The overarching goal of this project is to assess the impact of the large-scale ocean structure (as produced by GODAE), when used in conjunction with satellite observations, on the numerical prediction of the coastal ocean environment. Although the coastal circulation of the Monterey Bay and greater California central coast is in part driven by strong local forcing when present, the generally narrow continental shelf and open coastline of this region also leave it exposed to the energetic circulation of the California Current System offshore and more generally to the stratification and transports of the eastern Pacific ocean. The objective of this proposal is to use the Regional Ocean Modeling System (ROMS) and a recently developed suite of numerical tools (the ROMS 4 Dimensional variational data assimilation, ensemble prediction, and generalized stability analysis toolkits) to quantitatively explore the influence that open boundary conditions from Global Ocean Data Assimilation Experiment (GODAE) products and satellite-derived data have on the observability and predictability of the circulation in this coastal region.
A National Oceanographic Partnership Program Award. Prepared in cooperation with Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Earth Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences, Cambridge, MA; Naval Research Laboratory, Marine Meteorology Division, Monterey, CA; and NOAA/SWFSC, Environmental Research Division, Pacific Grove, CA. The original document contains color images.