About
The coastal environments include vulnerable regions and sensitive ecosystems. They also host most of the world populations and important economic activities (industry, fishing, ports and tourism). A sustainable management of these areas is the key to improve living standards and promote circular economy. Ocean and atmosphere modelling, in particular weather forecasting, is an essential tool to support risk assessment, safety and contingency planning, as part of the decision making framework.
ForMetOcean is the core of the Ekman’s atmospheric and oceanic forecast ecosystem, designed to support a number of activities in the ocean and atmosphere environment. It is based on integrated regional oceanic and atmospheric state of the art models (ROMS and WRF) configured to produce realistic predictions. The oceanic and atmospheric models have been widely used by team members in various regional configurations along the Brazilian and international coasts for over ten years.
Model Domain D1 (Marta-Almeida et al., 2021)
The forecasts on display are produced by operational atmospheric and oceanic modeling for the Sao Paulo and South Brazil regions (including the Santos and Pelotas Basins). The oceanic model is based on the high resolution nesting configuration described in Marta-Almeida et al. (2021), with enhanced resolution around Florianopolis, reaching about 150m. The atmospheric model also uses a nesting configuration with the parent domain extending well beyond the ocean model boundaries and the smaller domain covering the region of Florianopolis with very high resolution.
The operational system developed is robust and can be relocated or expanded to other regions. Configurations of the modeling system were already implemented for the Brazilian coast, covering the entirety of MetareaV. By using advanced lightweight web visualization techniques, all the forecast data can be made available by web in an easy way and in a variety of formats.
ForMetOcean is designed for a quick utilization of its ocean and atmospheric results by the other components of the forecast ecosystem.
– ForDrift: forecast oil spill dispersion and support search and rescue operations at sea;
– ForEnergy: forecast oceanic and atmospheric renewable energy potential; and
– ForBeach: forecast associated with beach processes.
Model Domain D2 and D3 (Marta-Almeida et al., 2021)