Reply on RC1

Abstract

Global tide and surge models play a major role in forecasting coastal flooding due to extreme events or climate change. The model performance is strongly affected by parameters such as bathymetry and bottom friction. In this study, we propose a method that estimates bathymetry globally and the bottom friction coefficient in the shallow waters for a Global Tide and Surge Model (GTSMv4.1). However, the estimation effect is limited by the scarcity of available tide gauges. We propose to complement sparse tide gauges with tide time-series generated using FES2014. The FES2014 dataset outperforms GTSM in most areas and is used as observations for the deep ocean and some coastal areas, such as Hudson Bay/Labrador, where tide gauges are scarce but energy dissipation is large. The experiment is performed with a computation and memory efficient iterative parameter estimation scheme applied to Global Tide and Surge Model (GTSMv4.1). Estimation results show that model performance is significantly improved for deep ocean and shallow waters, especially in the European Shelf directly using the CMEMS tide gauge data in the estimation. GTSM is also validated by comparing to tide gauges from UHSLC, CMEMS, and some Arctic stations in the year 2014.