Sicily Strait Regional Model Forecast System (1/48°)

OCEAN FORECAST FORCED BY THE WEATHER ECMWF MODEL

The system produces a daily 5-day forecast of 3D ocean temperatures, salinity and current velocities on a routine basis. The model has been implemented in the study area with a horizontal resolution of 1/48° and 30 sigma layers.

The model is forced by an interactive air-sea module through a coarse resolution (0.25° horizontal resolution) weather prediction model from the European for Centre Medium Weather Forecast (ECMWF). This consists in the use of a well-tuned set of bulk formulae for the computation of momentum, heat and freshwater fluxes at the air-sea interface. Fluxes depend upon the state of the ocean directly and by the 6-hours (00:00, 06:00, 12:00, 18:00 UTC) forecast fields of the atmospheric parameters (wind, temperature, cloud cover, specific humidity and pressure).

The lateral open boundary conditions are defined through an off-line one-way nesting technique (Sorgente et al., Annales Geophysicae, 2003) with the coarse forecasting system of the whole Mediterranean basin sea circulation (Pinardi et al., Annales Geophysicae, 2003).

The regional model was initialized every day through the optimization of the coarse resolution fields (temperature, salinity and current velocity) in order to remove the spurious external gravity waves during the spin-up phase. Details can be found in Gabersek et al, Ocean Science, 2007.

The forecast fields are available as daily means.