Overcoming tide-related challenges to successful regional and coastal ocean modeling

Abstract

Rapidly growing ocean data availability is fueling the establishment of new regional and coastal ocean models and operating systems, while growing global climate disruption necessitates robust long-term simulations of regional and coastal ocean processes and hazard risks. This work explains, for the first time together in one place, solutions for overcoming three fundamental, tide-related technical challenges in regional and coastal ocean modeling: (1) automatic generation of tidal harmonic forcings from coarser tidal constant databases; (2) perpetual generation of interannual tidal predictions inside hydrodynamic models, such as in the Regional Ocean Modeling System (ROMS); and (3) producing ocean model harmonic constant forcing data using tide models. A modified tidal prediction code (set_tides.F) for continuous multi-decadal simulations in ROMS is also provided as a practical solution to the second challenge, while the complete suite of techniques explained herein allows researchers to avoid tide-related errors in establishing regional and coastal ocean models and operation systems, and to harmonically analyze their output data.