The Northern Gulf of Mexico Littoral Initiative (NGLI), has begun development of a regional scale modeling system for the Mississippi Sounds and adjoining rivers, bays, and shelf waters. This system will provide the means to forecasts littoral circulation, sediment suspension and transports, and surface waves with possible coupling in the future. During NGLI, a field program was deployed to measure oceanographic and meteorology parameters, as well as sediment concentration.

The atmospheric forcing will be provided by a nested COAMPS configuration in which a higher resolution grid of 9-km is stationed over coastal Mississippi and Louisiana. The simulations are performed out to 48 hours in "cold-start" mode, in which NOGAPS provides the initialization and boundary conditions.

The effectiveness of the 9-km wind fields was evaluated using FNMOC's 27-km COAMPS runs as a baseline. The period of the study was December 12-December 20 when the NGLI region experienced many vigorous frontal passages. A qualitative analysis showed an overall improvement of the wind field (both wind speed and direction) in the vicinity of bays and along the coastline, particularly during windy events. A quantitative analysis using CMAN, buoy, and METAR data confirmed that the 9-km runs showed improvements in terms of in terms of skill score based on absolute errors for wind speed and direction. An attempts to reveal a systematic component of the 10-m wind errors and associate them with surface physical properties of both models will be undertaken. These results, as well as a general discussion of NGLI, will be presented at the conference.