Developing the capability to monitor and predict California coastal upwelling using an ocean circulation model
Abstract
Upwelling is the dominant oceanographic process along the California coast, and is responsible for cold sea surface temperature, high nutrients and productivity. The upwelling index produced by NOAA Pacific Fisheries Environmental Laboratory (PFEL) has been widely used by a broad range of users with a particular focus on fisheries. This upwelling index is based on the along-shore wind derived from the geostrophic wind relationship using sea level pressure simulated by the global atmospheric model with a typical resolution of 100-300 km. As the regional atmospheric model becomes operational at a much high spatial resolution (e.g., 3-km for the central California coast) and the emerging capability of forecasting the 3-dimensional ocean circulation, we can investigate the upwelling caused by both local forcing (e.g., wind stress curl and the interaction between ocean circulation and topography changes) and remotely forced processes (e.g., coastal Kelvin waves, basin-scale climate variability associated with ENSO and PDO, long-term climate change). In this study, we will use a 3-dimensional Regional Ocean Modeling System (ROMS) forced by high-resolution regional atmospheric forecasts to quantify the relative contributions of these local and remote processes. The atmospheric model is based on the Navy COAMPS with a resolution of 3 km. The ocean model covers the California coast with a horizontal resolution of 3 km and 40 vertical layers. As the first step, the ROMS derived vertical velocity is compared against the PFEL upwelling index for both climatology and individual upwelling events. The potential use of COAMPS and ROMS to enhance the PFEL upwelling index will be explored and the preliminary results will be discussed.
- Publication:
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AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2010
- Bibcode:
- 2010AGUFMOS13A1222W
- Keywords:
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- 4520 OCEANOGRAPHY: PHYSICAL / Eddies and mesoscale processes