Abstract
Norway has complicated dynamics in the coastal ocean and in the fjords. In this area is also the largest salmon aquaculture industry in the world. The salmon industry is valuable for Norwegian economy worth more than 60 billion NOK. Thus, it is important to know the physical oceanography along the coast, even variability on short temporal and spatial scales (h/km), to be able to quantify environmental effects of the aquaculture industry. This is the motivation behind the implementation of a current model covering the whole coast of Norway with a relatively high spatial grid size of 800 m. The NorKyst800 is an implementation of the ROMS current model with an elaborated system of forcing and boundary conditions. This model has an important role for Norwegian authorities in various management purposes. We show that the NorKyst800 results are realistic and typically deviating at most by 1 °C and one unit in salinity from observations. The currents in the upper 10–20 m of the water column vary in a similar way as observed current and the agreement is good. The usefulness of a tool like the NorKyst800 is illustrated by an example of dispersion of salmon lice which is the biggest problem the salmon industry presently is facing. Detailed information, as can be provided by NorKyst800, is needed to fully understand and quantify environmental effects of the aquaculture industry. Similar modeling systems describing the planktonic salmon lice concentration operationally could be beneficial also in other salmon-producing countries like Scotland, Canada, or Chile. The major requirement will be access to updated number of fish and female lice per fish on a weekly time scale.
Highlights
The coast of Norway is about 2000 km long from south to north
The solution to collect sufficient information in time and space was to establish an implementation of the Regional Ocean Current Model System (ROMS) current model for the whole Norwegian coast named the NorKyst800 (Albretsen et al 2011)
We have used the Regional Ocean Current Model System (ROMS) as the hydrodynamical model embedded in the NorKyst800 system (e.g., Shchepetkin and McWilliams 2005; Haidvogel et al 2008; or see http://myroms.org)
Summary
The coast of Norway is about 2000 km long from south to north. The average depth of the shelf along the coast is 300 m, and further offshore is the much deeper Norwegian sea. Differences in the stratification between the coast and the fjords can generate long internal waves in the intermediate water layer with an associated current which can be both relatively strong, have a large vertical extent and last for many days (Asplin et al 1999; Asplin et al 2013) Such internal waves are the most important forcing for water exchange above sill level inside the fjords and between the coastal ocean and the fjords. The solution to collect sufficient information in time and space was to establish an implementation of the ROMS current model (http://myroms.org) for the whole Norwegian coast named the NorKyst800 (Albretsen et al 2011) This is a compromise between spatial grid resolution to resolve dynamics and topography and geographical extension necessary to capture the full advective distance of the lice.
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