National Ocean Service’s Operational Coastal Storm Surge Forecasting Updates

Evolving user requirements, along with recent developments in coastal ocean modeling research, pave the way for new features and upgrades of the storm surge operational forecast systems (OFS). Since 2012, National Ocean Service’s Coast Survey Development Laboratory (CSDL) develops and transitions to operations a series of state-of-the-art storm surge OFS products. Increasing complexity and need for a better integration across NOAA numerical prediction modeling components requires redesign of existing OFS products, to allow for a more flexible and efficient update cycle, and provide compatibility with upcoming new applications.

CSDL storm surge products include a continuously-running extra-tropical surge forecast (ESTOFS), on-demand ensemble hurricane surge guidance (HSOFS), and high-fidelity Named Storm Event Model (NSEM) coupled hindcast/reanalysis system. ESTOFS provides coastal surge and tide forecast along the US East and Gulf Coasts and in the Caribbean (Atlantic domain), US West Coast and Hawaii (Pacific domain), and US territories from Palau to Marianas and Marshall Islands (Micronesia domain). HSOFS and NSEM are focused on the Atlantic domain but can potentially deploy in other domains as well.

All these systems share the same modeling framework. However, different nature of their applications has supported different development paths, which yielded a variety of new features (e.g., wave coupling, data assimilation, etc). In order to combine and employ all these innovations across the whole suite of CSDL storm surge end products, the underlying OFS platform is being redesigned. We will provide details on a new approach, and also discuss newly developed modeling components such as operational skill assessment with demonstrations of some preliminary results.