Regional Ocean Modeling System:
Monterey Bay

The ocean model is based on the Regional Ocean Modeling System (ROMS), which solves the primitive equations in a coastline- and terrain- following curvilinear coordinate. A detailed model description can be found in Shchepetkin and McWilliams (Journal of Geophysical Research, in press, 2003). The ROMS boundary condition has been documented in Marchesiello et al. (Ocean Modeling, 3, 1-20, 2001). ROMS was designed to be a parallel code, which uses 2D partitioning of the model grid into subdomains that may be assigned to different processors. ROMS can be run on both shared-memory (OpenMP) and distributed memory (MPI) machines. An early version of the OpenMP ROMS code can found at http://marine.rutgers.edu/po/. ROMS has been intended to be a multi- purpose, multi-disciplinary oceanic modeling tool.

Monterey Bay ROMS

A three-level nested ROMS centered around Monterey Bay (MB) is developed with a spatial resolution of 15-km, 5-km, and 1.5-km covering the U.S. West coast, central California coast, and Monterey Bay, respectively. The MB ROMS is forced with the real-time wind and includes a ten-compartment ecosystem model developed by Chai and Chao et al. (Journal of Oceanography, 59, 461-475, 2003). It has the capability of assimilating both the historical and real-time data (in situ and remotely sensed) through a 3-dimensional variational (3DVAR) method. The MB ROMS has been systematically evaluated against observations during the August 2003 field experiment as part of Autonomous Ocean Sampling Network (AOSN).