Coastal Ocean Model Development for Operational Prediction in NOAA's National Ocean Service

NOAA’s National Ocean Service (NOS) has many operational products that provide prediction capabilities of coastal environmental variables. Many of these products are developed using coastal ocean modeling applications using community hydrodynamic models. Examples include NOS’ 3D hydrodynamic operational forecast systems (OFS), real-time storm surge forecasting systems, and the vertical datum transformation tool VDatum. Model development for each of these products has common dependencies, such as model inputs (grids, bathymetry, shoreline), forcings, computing, and the hydrodynamic model codes. Community engagement is critical to advancing modeling capabilities, and NOS is committed to advancing research to operations (R2O) and operations to research (O2R) opportunities to support NOAA’s coastal modeling prediction goals. To streamline model development and operations, NOS has developed a coastal modeling portfolio to manage the model lifecycle process and most effectively meet user needs for coastal ocean modeling prediction. This lifecycle process has several components, including requirements gathering, requirements management, project planning, project management, operations and maintenance, and model retirement.

In addition, the NOS modeling portfolio is designed to align with a unified modeling approach for NOAA that will help the agency use the most effective number of models for similar tasks. Unified modeling within NOAA will help provide the necessary model diversity to support scientific advancement while providing an efficient application of the models for both science and operations. By following this approach, NOS will ensure that its coastal modeling program can most effectively integrate with all of NOAA modeling on effective strategies for computing infrastructure, data management, numerical approaches, R2O and O2R, community engagement, cross-disciplinary coupling, integration of socio-economics, governance, and best practices.

We will present examples of how NOS’ coastal modeling projects are being streamlined within the portfolio management process and NOAA's unified modeling strategy, and of how community engagement strategies are being used to advance modeling capabilities. These examples and strategies will demonstrate how NOS is working towards accelerating national-scale capabilities for coastal modeling prediction and hazard assessment.