Coastal ocean forecasting in Spanish ports: the SAMOA operational service

Abstract

SAMOA is the latest Puertos del Estado (PdE) initiative to boost the delivery of customized operational met-ocean information to the Spanish Port Authorities to meet port needs for decision making in harbour safety, environmental management and operations. Within this initiative, an advanced design of highresolution coastal operational systems for prediction of ocean circulation in restricted domains such as harbors and their nearby coastal waters has been performed. These systems are today fully implemented (in operations from January 2017) for 9 Spanish ports located in the Mediterranean, the Iberian Atlantic and the Canary Islands. This paper provides an end-to-end description of these SAMOA model systems, based on high resolution (up to 70 m horizontal resolution in inner port waters) ROMS model applications. At the surface, models are forced by daily updated high frequency (hourly) winds and heat and water fluxes from the Spanish Meteorological Agency (AEMET) forecast services. The SAMOA systems are CMEMS downstream services, being the coastal models nested into the regional CMEMS IBI forecast solution. A comprehensive multiparametric validation tool is used to evaluate the downscaled SAMOA coastal solutions, using operational observational sources (both remoted sensed, including HF Radars, and in-situ observations). A summary and some highlights of the scientific validation assessments performed both within the SAMOA preoperational model qualification phase and along the first months of operations are shown, illustrating the reasonable agreement of the SAMOA model products with observations. Finally, plans to upgrade SAMOA systems are outlined, providing a look ahead to future SAMOA developments and operational novelties.

Use of a hydrodynamic model for the management of water renovation in a coastal system

“…However, none of them addresses one of the most relevant problems inside the bay related to low water renovation and warm water temperatures during summer periods. For this, a high-resolution numerical model able to simulate interventions and impacts has been implemented for the first time in the bay using the available data from CMEMS numerical models (as initial and boundary conditions) and following the nesting scheme designed in the SAMOA initiative (Sotillo et al, 2019). The validation of such an implementation with the available data in the coarser domain has been done through comparison with HF-R water surface currents, revealing very good performance and agree-ment.…”

Use of a hydrodynamic model for the management of the water renovation in a coastal system

“…However, none of them faces one of the most relevant problems inside the bay related to the low water renovation and the warm water temperatures during summer periods. For this, a high resolution numerical model able to simulate interventions and impacts has been implemented for the first time in the bay using the available data from CMEMS numerical models (as initial and boundary conditions) and following the nesting scheme designed in SAMOA 30 initiative (Sotillo et al, 2018). The validation of such implementation with the available data in the coarser domain has been done through comparison with HF-Radar water surface currents, revealing very good performance and agreement.…”

Environmental Management System for the Analysis of Oil Spill Risk Using Probabilistic Simulations. Application at Tarragona Monobuoy

“…Wind and water current data for the model is obtained from the SAMOA system (in Spanish: Sistema de Apoyo Meteorológico y Oceanográfico de la Autoridad Portuaria). SAMOA is an initiative of the Spanish Public State Port Agency (Puertos del Estado) to provide port authorities with user-customized operational met-ocean information for harbor safety, environmental management, and operational decisions [11]. The SAMOA project provides hourly and daily values of meteo-hydrodynamic variables in the Tarragona Port area using two nested domains (see boundaries in Figure 1): Coastal domain (with a spatial resolution for currents of 350 m) and Port domain (70 m resolution).…”

“…The SAMOA project provides hourly and daily values of meteo-hydrodynamic variables in the Tarragona Port area using two nested domains (see boundaries in Figure 1): Coastal domain (with a spatial resolution for currents of 350 m) and Port domain (70 m resolution). Wind data is derived from the Spanish Meteorological Agency (AEMET) forecast services, which use two operational applications of the high resolution limited area model (HIRLAM) model: one is the HNR, covering the Spanish territory, which has a 0.05 • resolution and a forecast horizon of + 36 h, while the more extended regional euro-Atlantic ONR application has a 0.16 • resolution and a forecast horizon of + 72 h [11].…”