WeStCOMS

Model description:
The West Coast of Scotland Coastal Ocean Modelling System (WeStCOMS) is an operational forecasting implementation of the fine-scale unstructured ocean circulation model (FVCOM) coupled with high-resolution regional atmospheric model (WRF). Physical oceanographic group led by Dr Dmitry Aleynik has developed WeStCOMS and running it since 2013 on the High Performance Computing cluster in the Scottish Association for Marine Science, SAMS. WeStCOMS modelling system weekly produces an estimate of the ocean physical parameters over the nearest past and five days forecasts. The parameters modelled are ocean temperature and salinity, sea level, ocean currents and diffusivity. Smaller nested sub-domains with higher horizontal resolution varying from 30 m to 500 m include the Loch Etive, Loch Ewe, area around the Isle of Rum and near the Loch Melfort. Both the atmospheric and ocean models output data are freely available via SAMS THREDDS server.

WeStCOMS-FVCOM ocean model is driven by the surface forcing, derived from the localised operational Weather Research Forecasting model. The, WRF is the next generation mesoscale numerical prediction system designed at three sequentially nested domains with the highest resolution (2 km) over the whole Scottish mainland and Hebrides region. Available WRF model output subsets include wind speed components at 10m height, sea level pressure, net heat flux and solar radiation, precipitation and evaporation, vapour in air column, cloudiness, air relative humidity.

Finite Volume Community Ocean Model FVCOM is a prognostic, unstructured-grid, finite-volume, free-surface, 3-D primitive equation coastal ocean circulation model developed by joint efforts at UMASSD-WHOI.