Maritime Services Provided by National Ocean Service Coastal Ocean Operational Forecast Systems

Abstract:

Real-time marine forecast products based on numerical ocean models support a variety of maritime applications for coastal communities, such as marine navigation planning for port operations, harmful algal bloom forecasting and tracking, coastal hazard response, and emergency search and rescue. Advances in data acquisition technology, ocean dynamics, numerical schemes and visualization tools have made marine forecasts more accurate and reliable, and operational product dissemination and decision support services more timely. NOS collaborates with cross-agency and other federal partners, and extramural partners from academia to develop and transition models that reflect the needs of the local maritime community, non-governmental organizations, and the private sector that buoy their tools and decision-support applications. The goal of the NOS Coastal Modeling Program is to establish the necessary national operational infrastructure via an end-to-end framework that will provide timely and reliable forecast information to inform decision-making for multiple applications. The current status of NOS’ operational forecast systems and their resulting applications and services are being reviewed, and the systems are evolving to support future modeling products.