Sicily Strait Regional Model Forecast System (1/32°)
This is an electronic report for the Sicily Ocean Forecasting System at 1/32° of horizontal resolution.
Overview
The Sicily Ocean Regional Forecasting System provides a daily real-time, operational 5-day forecast of three-dimensional structure of temperature, salinity, speed and other physical parameters for the Sicily Strait and surrounding areas at 1/32° of horizontal resolution.
The Ocean Limited Area Model is based on the Princeton Ocean Model (POM), a three-dimensional primitive equation model (Blumberg and Mellor, Heaps N.S. Eds, 1987).
Domain: 8.95°E-17.1°E, 30°N-39.5°N
OCEAN FORECAST FORCED BY THE WEATHER SKIRON 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 Sicily Strait area with a horizontal resolution of 1/32° and 30 sigma layers. The model is forced by an interactive air-sea module through a high resolution (10 km horizontal resolution) weather prediction model (SKIRON), developed at the Atmospheric Modeling & Weather Forecasting Group of the Athens University (Kallos et al., J.Geoph.Res., 2005). The coupling between the ocean and the atmospheric model assumes that the net shortwave radiation and the download infrared radiation at the sea surface is provided directly by the atmospheric model at 1-hour interval while momentum, turbulent heat fluxes and freshwater are calculated by the bulk formulae through the simulated sea surface temperature. 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 is initialized every day through the downscaling and optimization of 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. |
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Sea forecast from
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Available at about 09:00 AM UTC
 Click on the picture to access the forecast
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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 Sicily Strait area with a horizontal resolution of 1/32° 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 where 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 a 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 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 hourly and 6-hourly means. |
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Sea forecast from
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Available at about 03:00 AM UTC
Click on the picture to access the forecast |
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free weekly run (daily fields) 
Sea hindcast from
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forced by ECMWF weather analysis fields
Available every Wednesday at about 07:00 AM UTC
Click on the picture to access the forecast |
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Monthly mean climatology (from 2008)
Sea hindcast monthly sections and maps of temperature, salinity, density, currents velocity, and surface elevation available from January 2008
Click on the picture to access the climatology |
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Contact |
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Versione Italiana |
| Dr Roberto Sorgente IAMC-CNR Oristano, c/o IMC, Loc. Sa Mardini, 09072 Torregrande (OR), Italy tel. +39.0783.22027/22136/22032 fax +39.0783.22002 email: roberto.sorgente@cnr.it |
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