National Weather Service United States Department of Commerce

Office of Science and Technology Integration

National Program

Development of high resolution MOM6 for NGGPS

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Proposal Title: Development of high resolution MOM6 for NGGPS

 

Principal Investigator: Eric Chassignet (FSU)

 

Co-Investigators:

Alan Wallcraft (FSU)

Alexandra Bozec (FSU)

 

Collaborators:

NWS/NCEP/EMC

GFDL

 

ABSTRACT:

NWS/NCEP is currently using GFDL’s MOM4 and SIS1 for its CFS v2 operational seasonal prediction system and HYCOM in the global Real-Time Ocean Forecast System (RTOFS) for its short-term ocean forecasts at weather scales. Lately, MOM6 has been selected as the ocean component of the next generation S2S scale operational coupled global modeling system within the UFS framework. MOM6 incorporates many of the key capabilities that are available in HYCOM, notably including a C-grid spatial discretization (appropriate at higher resolutions) and the Arbitrary Lagrangian-Eulerian (ALE) approach to the vertical coordinate. Traditional choices for the vertical in ocean models include, geopotential (good for high latitudes, near-surface and mixed layer), terrain-following (good for coastal areas), and isopycnal (good for the deep ocean). The ALE method allows a hybrid vertical coordinate that can "emulate" a combination of these choices that varies in space and time. HYCOM uses a "favor isopycnals" approach that has isopycnal layers in the deep ocean outcropping into fixed depth layers nearer the surface, and MOM6's HYCOM-like option gives a similar result, but using an algorithm based on layer interfaces rather than layer thicknesses.

Building on the comparison of equivalent global MOM6 and HYCOM configurations performed using ESPC funding, which showed broadly similar results from the two models, we now have the possibility of unifying NCEP/EMC’s ocean modeling suite from weather to  seasonal scales using one ocean model based on MOM6.

This project will focus on advancing capabilities with MOM6 as follows:

  1. Build, test and validate 1/12° degree Global MOM6 as a future mesoscale ocean component for RTOFS and eventually for future Global UFS forecast systems;

  2. Build, test and validate use of 1/12° degree global MOM6 with RTOFS-DA (NCODA);

  3. Explore alternative ocean data assimilation methods for the above high resolution MOM6 models using the JEDI framework.