A Super-Regional Modeling Testbed for Improving Forecasts of

Environmental Processes for the U.S. Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico Coasts

Don Wright, SURAPrincipal Investigator

Rich Signell, USGS Technical Advisory and Evaluation Group Chair

• Motivation for the testbed: improving prediction of environmental processes

• Design of this testbed• Year 1 products• Future work

                          

Outline

Improving Forecasts of Coastal Environmental Processes

• Factors: open boundary conditions, surface and river forcing conditions, enhanced physics, adjustable parameters, data assimilation, numerics, amount of data assimilated, skill of modelers(!), vertical and horizontal resolution, coupling to wave and met models.

•  “Which model is better?” is not the right question. What factors in the simulation resulted in a better solution?  How much better? At what cost? 

Defining Improvement

• To measure improvement for environmental processes, we need to define skill metrics for specific environmental processes and often for specific region

• Inundation, search and rescue, deep oil spills, navigation, hypoxia, harmful algal blooms, diver operations, alternative energy siting, beach erosion, regional impact of climate change all require different skill metrics

• Operational centers need community help in this process – too broad for NOAA and NAVY!   

    The ocean community needs a common cyberinfrastructure to access, analyze and display data from the different models:  each model currently has their own standards and toolsets

A Common Cyberinfrastructure for Model Data

Structured Grids Unstructured Grid

5x5

6x3

10 nodes

Variety of StretchedVertical Coordinates

The Plan:• Build a common infrastructure to enable access, analysis and visualization of all coastal ocean model data produced by NOAA, NAVY and IOOS

• Develop skill metrics and assess models in three different regions and dynamical regimes, to ensure a robust and powerful infrastructure

• Identify factors that could be transitioned to operations• Build stronger relationships between academia and operational centers through collaboration

A Testbed Framework for Coastal Ocean Models

Testbed “Management”

Testbed Advisory Evaluation Group

Shelf HypoxiaGulf of Mexico

Estuarine HypoxiaChesapeake Bay

Cyber Infrastructure

Coastal InundationGulf and East Coast

Testbed Team

Structure

Rick Luettich, UNC-CHJohn Harding, MSUCarl Friedrichs, VIMS

Rich Signell, USGS

Eoin Howlett, ASA

Don Wright, SURA

Doug Levin, NOAA/IOOS Liz Smith, SURA

25 members

21 members 20 members 24 members

7 members

Cyberinfrastructure (CI)All Regions – All Teams  Extending CI from OGC, Unidata and others (NOAA DMIT, USGS CDI) to support unstructured grids, and add functionality

 Web Access via OpenDAP w/CF   Unidata Common Data Model/NetCDF Java Library API

Distributed search capability Browser based map viewer (WMS) Toolbox for scientific desktop analysis All components standards-based!

Search services

Mapping services and browse application

Analyze in scientific desktop application

Inundation Extra-tropical – Gulf of MaineTropical – Gulf of Mexico

- 4 models: 3 unstructured grid +1 structured grid- Coupled wave-storm surge-inundation (TWL)- Consistent forcing, validation and skill assessment using existing IMEDS tool - Extensive observational data sets for historical storms Ike, Rita and Gustav in standard formats

- SURA has provided supercomputer resources

Extratropical Grid

Tropical Grids for Galveston Bay

Estuarine Hypoxia Chesapeake Bay

1. Estuary:– 5 Hydrodynamic models– 3 Biological (DO) models– 2004 data from 28 CBP stations– Comparing T, S, max (dS/dz), DO via target diagrams2.  Shelf: OBCs 5 hydrodynamic models

Models doing better on oxygen than stratification!

Stratification (dS/Dz) Dissolved Oxygen

Shelf Hypoxia Gulf of MexicoHydrodynamic & biogeochemical hindcast comparisons of hypoxia model (stand alone) coupled to 3 different Gulf of Mexico hydrodynamics modelsEvaluation of two shelf hypoxia formulations (NOAA & EPA)

• Foundation of a cyberinfrastructure framework for search, access and display of all NOAA, NAVY and IOOS model data, via browser and scientific desktop application

• Skill metrics and identification of key performance factors and cost for three important dynamical regimes and environmental issues

• CONOPS for transition from research to operations • Improved communication between research and 

operations

Testbed Year 1 Products

• Expand to more regions and problems• Examine more factors (e.g. data assimilation)• Build out the cyberinfrastructure • Conduct training in the community• Sustaining future development

Future Work for the Testbed (1/2)

• “How much do I get for how much?” is a better question than: “How much does a testbed cost?” 

• $250K full time developer to help people get their data connected, maintain the servers, build (limited functionality into the toolkit)

• $500K for three investigators to look at a particular issue, develop metrics, compare models (deep oil spill, harmful algal bloom, different data assimilation techniques)

• $4000K for another year like Year 1

Future Work for the Testbed (2/2)