Edward Myers (left) and modeling workshop attendees from Coast Survey, CO-OPS, the NWS, and university partners.

August 28, 2019

Greetings Coast Survey colleagues,

I’m Ed Myers, and it is my pleasure to provide this week’s opening note to the Coast Survey newsletter. I am the chief of the Coastal Marine Modeling Branch (CMMB) that is located in the Coast Survey Development Laboratory (CSDL). Our branch develops, tests, and implements operational models and tools that are used to provide the public with real-time information about our coastal environment. These products include the 3D Operational Forecast Systems (OFS), storm surge OFS, nowCOAST, and VDatum tide modeling.

Our group uses hydrodynamic models to simulate the coastal ocean response to tides, weather, and river interactions. These models forecast water levels, currents, temperature and salinity, which are all computed as they change in time and space. The National Ocean Service currently uses three primary models that are developed and maintained by academic groups: ROMS, FVCOM, and ADCIRC. Our branch develops model applications to specific bays, estuaries, and coastal areas for use as OFS that are managed operationally by the Center for Operational Oceanographic Products and Services (CO-OPS) and the National Centers for Environmental Prediction. This is a community effort, so we work closely with other development groups and academia on advancing model coverage and capabilities. Our 3D OFS team includes John Kelley, Zizang Yang, Lei Shi, Alex Kurapov, Wei Wu, Greg Seroka, Sergey Vinogradov, Yi Chen, Phil Richardson, and Zach Burnett. Some key capabilities that we are currently evaluating with the models are data assimilation and ice forecasting.

Our branch also has OFS that are focused on forecasting storm surge, specifically the Extratropical Surge and Tide OFS that runs four times every day and the Hurricane Surge On-demand Forecast System that is run during hurricanes by the National Hurricane Center. The storm surge team is led by Sergey Vinogradov and also includes Yuji Funakoshi, Jaime Calzada-Marrero, and Saeed Moghimi. We also use coastal models to simulate tides as part of the process of computing tidal datums for VDatum, NOAA’s vertical datum transformation software. Our VDatum team is composed of Kurt Hess, Lei Shi, Wei Wu, Rachel Tang, Chudong Pan, and Michael Lalime.

nowCOAST is a web mapping portal developed by our team in New Hampshire - John Kelley, Jason Greenlaw, Erin Nagel, and Adam Gibbons (recent summer position) - and provides users with easy access to NOAA’s observations, satellite imagery, model forecasts (including our OFS), watches/warnings/advisories, and more. This same team is also developing innovative strategies and tools for dissemination of data and models needed for Precision Navigation capabilities using machine-to-machine formats. A key component of this will be making data and model results available in S-100 data formats, and Erin Nagel (along with Greg Seroka, Neil Weston, Kurt Hess, and Jason Greenlaw) has developed this capability for converting our OFS surface currents into the S-111 format.

Working with other modeling efforts in NOAA is critical to our group. For example, through the COASTAL Act and the NOAA Water Initiative, Saeed Moghimi is leading efforts to couple our models to wave models run by the National Weather Service (NWS) Environmental Modeling Center (EMC) and to the National Water Model (NWM) operated by the NWS Office of Water Prediction. This allows information to be shared on how each model’s real-time results may affect the other models to which it is coupled, and vice versa. It is very important for our modeling strategies to align with NOAA efforts to develop Unified Modeling capabilities across our organization and to engage with the scientific community through initiatives such as the Earth Prediction Innovation Center (EPIC).

I really like the following quote I have heard used in NOAA leadership speeches: “People first, mission always.” I have great respect for each individual on my team, as each brings a unique passion for the science and technology developed for our products and for the greater good that those products provide to society. I therefore close with a big thanks to the CMMB team for their world-class contributions to our mission.