Overview of the Navy's Coupled Mesoscale Modeling System

The Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) recently has added several new capabilities to the Coupled Ocean/Atmosphere Mesoscale Prediction System (COAMPS®) to provide more accurate analyses and predictions of the atmosphere and ocean at high-resolution. An overview of these new COAMPS capabilities will be highlighted in this presentation. COAMPS has been coupled in a two-way interactive sense to the NRL Coastal Ocean Model (NCOM) and the SWAN and WWIII wave models using the Earth System Modeling Framework (ESMF). A description of the coupled system will be presented along with examples from the coupled model. Other capabilities that will be highlighted include: i) a coupled tropical cyclone (TC) system and a TC ensemble capability, ii) a coupled ensemble system, iii) 4D-variational and ensemble Kalman filter data assimilation systems, iv) a nested adjoint and mesoscale observation impact system, and iv) new physical parameterization for the planetary boundary layer and moist processes. The tropical cyclone system, COAMPS-TC, has been demonstrated in real time over several different basins during the past 5 years, and transitioned to Navy operations in 2013 motivated by the fact that it was one of the top performing dynamical models for tropical cyclone intensity prediction. Lastly, a discussion of the future plans for the Navy's mesoscale modeling system will include a summary of the recent development of a new nonhydrostatic dynamical core model, NEPTUNE based on spectral element and discontinuous Galerkin techniques. Examples of the new dynamical core will be shown for idealized and real-data cases.