Development of a New Coupled Inland-Coastal 3D Operational Forecast System for Southeastern US Coast (SECOFS)

We are developing a new 3D Southeast Coastal Operational Forecast System (SECOFS) by working actively with local stakeholders and navigation managers in the region. Besides having a fully coupled inland-coastal capability suitable for compound flooding prediction, SECOFS will also feature an enhancement of the coupling infrastructure to be compliant with the Unified Forecast System (UFS) and the NOAA efforts for the development of a generic coastal flood modeling skill assessment and evaluation infrastructure for operational models. The model is built on SCHISM’s (schism.wiki) flexible horizontal and vertical grid system (with 1.5 million horizontal nodes and 1-50 vertical layers), ensuring accuracy, robustness, and efficiency. The coupling with the National Water Model is achieved using a simple and yet effective approach at the land boundary. We have preliminarily validated the new modeling system with year-long hindcasts for total water level, currents, salinity and temperature, and are continuously updating the unstructured mesh based on improvements in DEMs and user feedback. SECOFS is envisioned to serve multiple purposes to benefit diverse stakeholders, from flood hazard mitigation to safe precision navigation to search and rescue, etc.