An Integrated Hydrological Modeling System for High-Resolution Coastal Applications

This presentation will describe the initial software architectural design, development, and testing of a new prototype high-resolution coupled hydrological modeling capability within the Navy's operational mesoscale prediction system COAMPS® . The proposed Navy capability will leverage ongoing and new hydrological community efforts to create an integrated, generalized ESMF-based framework compatible with current state-of-the-art land-surface (LS) and hydrological systems (such as the NASA LIS and WRF-Hydro, and NASA LIS/”NLDAS”, a community uncoupled multi-land-model ensemble, run operationally over CONUS at NCEP; NLDAS=North American Land Data Assimilation System). This initial capability will be obtained through the integration/development and testing at high-resolution of the linked LS hydrological system and the atmospheric moist physics scheme within the coupled air-land-ocean COAMPS framework. This linkage will provide a new capability for accurately quantifying the impact of coastal terrestrial hydrological events on the LS at high-resolution, such as flash flooding, beach erosion, and LS traffic-ability. The modular ESMF-based structure will facilitate inter-comparison with other LS, hydrological and moist physics/cloud schemes within LIS and WRF-Hydro. This new coupled system will serve as the baseline development and validation of important coupled atmospheric-LS hydrological processes and will establish the foundation necessary for a fully coupled land-ocean system that would include interactions with marine processes, such as fresh-water stream inflow affecting near-coast water density vertical structure and transport of riverine sediment impacting local bathymetry and water clarity.