ROMS and SUNTANS Continued Development and Support of AESOP and NLIWI

Abstract

Our long-term goal is to develop a parallel ocean simulation tool that is capable of simulating processes on a wide range of scales by coupling two vastly different codes, namely the Regional Ocean Modeling System (ROMS, Shchepetkin and McWilliams (2005)), and the Stanford Unstructured Nonhydrostatic Terrain-following Adaptive Navier-Stokes Simulator (SUNTANS, Fringer et al. (2006)). The tool will adaptively nest SUNTANS, an unstructured-grid, coastal-scale code, into ROMS, a curvilinear grid, regional-scale code, in regions where the motions are small-scale and so nonhydrostatic. The nested tool will be applied to study highly nonlinear internal waves in the South China Sea in order to develop an improved understanding of mechanisms that govern their generation, propagation, and dissipation. In support of the long term goal of developing a two-way nested simulation tool to study the interaction of internal waves with mesoscale currents, our objectives are two-fold. The first is to study internal waves in Monterey Bay in support of the AESOP DRI (Assessing the Effects of Submesoscale Ocean Parameterizations), and the second is to study fundamental internal wave processes in the South China Sea in support of the NLIWI and DRI (Nonlinear Internal Waves Initiative). Because recent work employing separate SUNTANS and ROMS simulations has focused on the California coastal current and internal waves in the Monterey Bay region, the west coast was the obvious choice as the study site for the development of the coupled tool, although the ultimate goal is to apply it to the South China Sea.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Jan 01, 2009
Accession Number
ADA527138

Entities

People

  • Oliver Fringer
  • Robert Lynnwood Street

Organizations

  • Stanford University

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Energy and Power Technologies

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Computational Fluid Dynamics
  • Energy
  • Engineering
  • Environmental Engineering
  • Equations
  • Frequency
  • High Resolution
  • Internal Waves
  • Large Eddy Simulation
  • Oceans
  • Pacific Ocean
  • Ridges
  • South China Sea
  • Terrain
  • Topography
  • Wave Power
  • Waves

Fields of Study

  • Environmental science

Readers

  • Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD)
  • Ocean-Atmosphere Mesoscale Modeling, Data Assimilation, and Flux Boundary Layers