Skill Assessment of a Coast-Ocean Circulation Model in the U.S. East Coast

Abstract

In the study, an integrated coastal and ocean process model, CCHE2D-Coast, is validated by assessing the model skills in simulating coast-ocean circulations driven by the astronomical tides in the U.S. Northeast and Mid-Atlantic coast. Through the skill assessment, discrepancies between numerically simulated water surface elevations and observed tidal elevations at NOAA tide gages are quantified. The model skill indices such as the Normalized Root-Mean Square, the Coefficient of Determination, the Scatter Index, and the Bias are calculated from comparisons of the errors. On the other hand, statistical errors of the tidal constituent parameters, amplitudes and phases, are also determined by using a newly-developed parameter identification approach. Good agreement between the model-identified phases and amplitudes of the harmonic constituents with the values provided by NOAA is obtained. The skill assessment results reveal that the model can produce accurate tidal elevations in the regional domain covering the US East Coast.