Toward a Comprehensive Water-Quality Modeling of Barnegat Bay: Development of ROMS to WASP Coupler

Abstract

ABSTRACT Defne, Z.; Spitz, F.J.; DePaul, V., and Wool, T.A., 2017. Toward a comprehensive water-quality modeling of Barnegat Bay: Development of ROMS to WASP coupler. In: Buchanan, G.A.; Belton, T.J., and Paudel, B. (eds.), A Comprehensive Assessment of Barnegat Bay-Little Egg Harbor, New Jersey. The Regional Ocean Modeling System (ROMS) has been coupled with the Water Quality Analysis Simulation Program (WASP) to be used in a comprehensive analysis of water quality in Barnegat Bay, New Jersey. The coupler can spatially aggregate hydrodynamic information in ROMS cells into larger WASP segments. It can also be used to resample ROMS output at a finer temporal scale to meet WASP time-stepping requirements. The coupler aggregates flow components, temperature, and salinity in ROMS output for input to WASP via a hydrodynamic linkage file. The coupler was tested initially with idealized cases designed to verify the water mass balance and conservation of constituent mass using one-to-one and one-to-many connectiv...