In a major project entitled “Interdisciplinary Marine Environmental Prediction in the Atlantic Coastal Region”, a team of collaborators is developing a real-time prediction capability for the coastal regions of Atlantic Canada. This research and development is making heavy use of a newly established atmosphere-ocean observing system in Lunenburg Bay, Nova Scotia. The observations will be used to guide and test the marine coastal prediction system in an examination of many marine environmental phenomena such as waves, surface winds, sea breezes, fog, coastal upwelling, and currents in coastal embayments, that are important on daily to weekly time scales. The outcomes will be particularly relevant for the problem of coastal pollution, and the resulting technology will be transferable to other similar coastal areas. This project will lead to significantly improved knowledge and understanding of: (i) how the coupled ocean/atmosphere system works in the Atlantic sector; (ii) how ecological processes can be incorporated into realistic physical models; (iii) the predictive skill of interdisciplinary coupled atmosphere/shelf/bay models on time scales of days to weeks; and (iv) the consequences of episodic phenomena including extreme weather events. It will result in coupled atmosphere/ocean/wave models and techniques that will be suitable for adaptation by government agencies and it will produce improved numerical models for describing and forecasting coastal ocean physical and biological conditions.

In this presentation we examine some of the early results for the physical conditions simulated by the coupled atmosphere-ocean modelling system that is being developed for Lunenburg Bay. The Meteorological Service of Canada is providing the atmospheric modelling, consisting of an operational regional model configuration and an embedded hi-resolution research model, as well as the coupler through which the various component models interact. The Lunenburg Bay ocean model is a high-resolution eddy-resolving coastal model using the free-surface version of CANDIE (Sheng et al., 2001), with lateral boundary conditions provided by a larger scale Scotian shelf model. The modelling system performance is being evaluated by comparing with measured atmospheric, ocean surface elevation, and ocean current observations from the Lunenburg Bay observing system for several periods. Preliminary model results agree reasonably well with the observations. Latest results will be presented at the conference.