An Integrated Hydrological Modeling System for High-Resolution Coastal Applications

Lead PI: Teddy Holt & Sue Chen, Naval Research Laboratory
Start Year: 2015 | Duration: 3 Years
Partners: NOAA Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES), National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP) Environmental Modeling Center (EMC), National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) Research Applications Laboratory (RAL), NASA Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) & U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory (CRREL)


The objective of this project is the 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.

 


Annual PI Reports


FY 2015 PI Report

FY 2017 PI Report