Development of the East Florida Coastal Ocean Model (EFCOM)

Florida’s Atlantic coast has abundant resources in beaches, state parks, aquatic preserves, and wildlife refuges as well as densely populated coastal cities in low lying areas that are all subjected to natural disaster threats from the oceans. There is an urgent need for a high-resolution coastal ocean circulation model for this region. Based on the application of the Finite Volume Community Ocean Model (FVCOM), we develop an East Florida Coastal Ocean Model (EFCOM), downscaling from the deep ocean, across the continental shelf, and into the estuaries. It uses an unstructured grid with horizontal resolution varying from 3 kilometers at the open boundary to 30 meters in the estuaries and 30 sigma layers in the vertical direction. The model is configured for realistic simulation of ocean circulation with surface winds and heat fluxes from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) National Centers for Environmental Predictions (NCEP) North American Mesoscale (NAM) model, and river inflow data from the United States Geological Survey (USGS). On the open boundary, EFCOM is nested within the Global Hybrid Coordinate Model (HYCOM) for 3D velocity, temperature, salinity and sea level with added tides. The hindcast simulation is quantitatively evaluated against the observations of water levels, current velocities, temperature, and salinity from NOAA CO-OP stations. Preliminary results are promising. The EFCOM will be set up as a daily nowcast/forecast system providing important guidance information for navigation, flooding and inundation associated with storm surges, harmful algal blooms, and Sargassum inundations for this coastal region in the future.