Predictability of wind‐induced sea surface transport in coastal areas

Abstract

In this work we investigated the predictability of the wind‐induced sea surface transport in coastal areas. The wind fields predicted by two state‐of‐the‐art meteorological models, namely ECMWF and SKIRON, were used as forcing for a hydrodynamic and particle‐tracking model applied to reproduce a set of observed drifters trajectories in a coastal area of the Mediterranean Sea. A set of anemometric data derived by in situ measurements were also adopted as model forcing to reproduce the observed drifter paths. This approach provided a baseline that was used as a reference for evaluating the effects of the predicted wind accuracy on the numerical model solution. The accuracy of the simulation results obtained using, as model forcing, the observed wind data was fair and suitable for most of the operational oceanographic purposes. It decreased when using the wind data predicted by the two meteorological models. In particular, the results obtained using ECMWF data were about 3 times more accurate than the ones obtained using SKIRON ones. The uncertainties were strongly dependent on the range of observed wind speed classes with a different behavior depending on the type of adopted wind data. Finally, the amplification of the errors in predicting the sea surface transport generated by the inaccuracies of the predicted wind fields was quantified.

Simulation of the 2003 Foss Barge - Point Wells Oil Spill: A Comparison between BLOSOM and GNOME Oil Spill Models

“…This is because solutions for the turbulent transfer of momentum, from wind to the ocean, decay exponentially with depth, and are therefore sensitive to a coarse vertical resolution. Near the sea surface, the vertical resolution for ocean models used to simulate Lagrangian transport should be maximized, and is typically on the order of tens of centimeters (e.g., [27][28][29]), in marked contrast with the 4 to 6 m resolution of the uppermost layer of the model used for this study (except very near the coast, where the vertical resolution is higher). Indeed, even high vertical ocean model resolutions will need further parameterizations at times, since ocean models to not typically represent processes such as wind drift or Stokes drift.…”

HR3DHG version 1: modeling the spatiotemporal dynamics of mercury in the Augusta Bay (southern Italy)

“…The advection terms describe the effects on the Hg distributions induced by (i) the horizontal velocity components (v x (x, y, z, t) and v y (x, y, z, t)) of the marine currents along the x and y directions and (ii) the vertical velocity component (v z (x, y, z)) along the z direction. The horizontal velocities are calculated using results achieved by applying a hydrodynamic model to the area (Umgiesser et al, 2004;Umgiesser, G. Denaro et al: HR3DHG version 1 2009;Cucco et al, 2016aCucco et al, , 2019) (see Sect. S3 of the Supplement) and change as a function of space and time.…”

Summertime Connecticut River Water Pathways and Wind Impacts

“…Regional atmospheric models are well suited to force various real‐time models in Mid‐Atlantic Bight (Wilkin & Hunter, ). However, those 10‐ to 30‐km resolution models may underestimate wind impacts on estuarine circulation (Scully, ; Xie & Li, ) and cause errors on predicting surface drifter trajectories (Cucco et al, ). Especially, when the modeled estuaries are at similar or smaller scales to the forcing resolution.…”