Beta Testing with the Nearshore Wave Prediction System and Rip Current and Wave Run Up Forecasting at the Weather Forecast Office

The demand for high-resolution guidance of nearshore marine hazards such as waves, rip currents and wave runup has been steadily increasing over the past decade. To address this need, the Nearshore Wave Prediction System (NWPS) is being implemented across the National Weather Service (NWS) with support for local and centralized (operational supercomputer) model simulations where it will represent NWS's first truly on-demand, centrally hosted modeling system. To ensure consistency in marine forecasting, NWPS is driven by forecaster-developed wind grids compiled locally at coastal Weather Forecast Offices (WFOs). The model simulations are configured in real time using a GUI baselined in AWIPS 2, and subsequently submitted to a local workstation, the NWS operational supercomputer, or both, where they are processed using the spectral wind wave model SWAN. The simulation also incorporates tidal and storm surge water levels from ESTOFS (extra-tropical conditions) and P-Surge (tropical conditions), and hazardous shelf-scale surface currents from RTOFS Global. The forecast guidance provided by NWPS includes fields of integral wave parameters (e.g. significant wave height, period and direction), as well as partitioned and tracked wave systems. Additionally, downstream models (forced by NWPS output) that provide empirical guidance on rip currents and wave runup are being incorporated and tested as part of NWPS. WFO Miami is serving as a developmental testbed, building the AWIPS baseline software in support of NWPS deployment, and serving as one of the pilot sites for the aforementioned rip current and wave run up models (which includes WFOs Boston, Tampa Bay and Morehead City also). The presentation summarizes AWIPS 2 NWPS experience from the WFO Miami perspective, expands on previously reported rip current model validation, presents preliminary validation assessments of the wave runup forecast component, and describes how this guidance is assimilated into the forecast process.