FVCOM one-way and two-way nesting using ESMF: Development and validation. (April 2018)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Qi, Jianhua; Chen, Changsheng; Beardsley, Robert C.
• Is Part Of: Ocean modelling. Volume 124(2018)
• Page Start: 94
• Page End: 110
• Publication Date: 2018-04
• Subjects: FVCOM ocean model -- ESMF -- One-way nesting -- Two-way nesting; Oceanography -- Periodicals; Océanographie -- Périodiques; Oceanography; Periodicals; 551.46
• DOI: 10.1016/j.ocemod.2018.02.007
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 1463-5003

Abstract

Highlights: ESMF coupler implemented in FVCOM. One-way and two-way nesting performance were evaluated. Two-way nesting is required for coastal ocean simulation. Abstract: Built on the Earth System Modeling Framework (ESMF), the one-way and two-way nesting methods were implemented into the unstructured-grid Finite-Volume Community Ocean Model (FVCOM). These methods help utilize the unstructured-grid multi-domain nesting of FVCOM with an aim at resolving the multi-scale physical and ecosystem processes. A detail of procedures on implementing FVCOM into ESMF was described. The experiments were made to validate and evaluate the performance of the nested-grid FVCOM system. The first was made for a wave-current interaction case with a two-domain nesting with an emphasis on qualifying a critical need of nesting to resolve a high-resolution feature near the coast and harbor with little loss in computational efficiency. The second was conducted for the pseudo river plume cases to examine the differences in the model-simulated salinity between one-way and two-way nesting approaches and evaluate the performance of mass conservative two-way nesting method. The third was carried out for the river plume case in the realistic geometric domain in Mass Bay, supporting the importance for having the two-way nesting for coastal-estuarine integrated modeling. The nesting method described in this paper has been used in the Northeast Coastal Ocean Forecast System (NECOFS)-a global-regional-coastal nesting FVCOM system that has been placed into the end-to-end forecast and hindcast operations since 2007.