A Community Terrain-Following Ocean Modeling System (ROMS/TOMS)

The long-term technical goal is to design, develop and test the next generation, primitive equation ocean model for high-resolution scientific ROMS Regional Ocean Modeling System and operational TOMS Terrain-following Ocean Modeling System applications. This project will improve the ocean modeling capabilities of the U.S. Navy for relocatable, coastal, coupled atmosphere-ocean forecasting applications. It will also benefit the ocean modeling community at large by providing the current state-of-the-art knowledge in physics, numerical schemes, and computational technology. The main objective is to produce a tested expert ocean-modeling framework for scientific and operational applications over a wide range of spatial coastal to basin and temporal days to seasons scales. The primary focus is to implement the most robust set of options and algorithms for relocatable coastal forecasting systems nested within basin-scale operational models for the Navy. The system includes some of the analysis and prediction tools that are available in Numerical Weather Prediction NWP, such as 4-dimensional variational data assimilation 4D-Var, ensemble prediction, adaptive sampling, and circulation stability and sensitivity analysis.