RSMAS/MPO Coastal and Shelf Modeling

The model domain (first large scale resolving grid or parent grid) is the northeastern Caribbean encompassing some of the Windward Islands, the US and British Virgin Islands, Puerto-Rico, and Dominican Republic (14-23°N, 71-61°W). A zoom on the Island of St Thomas is done through two nested (child)grids in the parent grid. They are nested on-line (run simultaneously) using the Adaptive Grid Refinement in Fortran (AGRIF - Blayo and Debreu 1999) package. A two-nested grid simulation, using the same parent grid was used to zoom on Mona Island. The child grid encompasses western Puerto-Rico and the Mona Passage. The parent grid simulation was used as a nature run.

RESOLUTION:

The horizontal resolution of the simulation of the parent grid is 6 km, first child grid 2km and third child grid 700 m. The three models have 25 vertical layers.

FORCING:

Monthly varying surface fluxes from the Comprehensive Ocean Atmosphere Dataset (http://icoads.noaa.gov/) (COADS) climatology.

Tides were set at the boundaries by the TPXO6 global tide model(http://www.esr.org/polar_tide_models/Model_TPXO62_load.html).

APPLICATIONS:

• Acropora Palmata reef building coral genetic break
• Seasonal variability of the mesoscale activity in the eastern Caribbean
• Fate of grouper larvae from spawning aggregations
• Connectivity patterns of shallow reef building coral and Nassau groupers populations in the US Virgin Islands
• Origin and patterns of the 2005 coral bleaching event in the Caribbean
• CaRA operational ocean model

CONTACT:

Laurent Cherubin — lcherubin@rsmas.miami.edu
Nasseer Idrisi — nidrisi@uvi.edu