Thanks for visiting the South Atlantic Bight and Gulf of Mexico Circulation Nowcast/Forecast (SABGOM N/F) Modeling System developed, operated and maintained by Ocean Observing and Modeling Group of Department of Marine, Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, North Carolina State University.

This quasi-operational model was implemented based on the Regional Ocean Modeling System (ROMS), a new community ocean circulation model that is in widespread use for estuarine, shelf, and coastal applications. Its computational kernel includes high-order advection and time-stepping schemes, weighted temporal averaging of the barotropic mode to reduce aliasing into the slow baroclinic motions, and conservative parabolic splines for vertical discretization. A redefinition of the pressure-gradient term is also applied in ROMS to reduce the pressure-gradient truncation error, which has previously limited the accuracy of terrain-following coordinate models.

Spatial resolution of this SABGOM N/F system is 5 km. Vertically, it has 36 layers weighted to better resolve surface and bottom boundary layers. For open boundary conditions, the N/F system is nested inside the operational 1/12^o global data assimilative HYCOM NCODA analysis, superimposed by tidal harmonics from ADCIRC western Atlantic tidal database. Surface forcing is obtained from NOAA National Operational Model Archive and Distribution System (NOMADS).

The system was designed to launch daily SABGOM circulation nowcast and forecast (up to 3 days) as soon as it detects that NCODA and NOMADS fields become available. Automated scripts are used to handle data pre- and post- processing, model execution, and web posting of 3-hourly predictions.

The animation in the lower right corner shows surface winds (magenta vectors), SABGOM ROMS predicted sea surface currents (black vectors) and sea level (color shading). The oscillating sea level change is associated with tides that are also simulated by our model.