Search

Open boundaries (OBs) are usually unavoidable in numerical coastal circulation simulations. At OBs, an appropriate open boundary condition (OBC) is required so that outgoing waves freely pass to the exterior without creating reflections back into the interior of the computational domain. In this paper, the authors derive, based on the shallow-water equations including bottom friction and neglecting Coriolis effect and by means of nonlinear characteristic analysis, an OBC formulation with two predictive parameters, phase speed cr, and decay time Tf. Simple idealized tests are performed to demonstrate the proposed OBC's excellent skills in elimination of unwanted reflections at OBs when the motion is periodic, as assumed in its theoretical derivation. It turns out that the formulas for the two OBC parameters become independent of period in the limit of small friction and/or short period. This feature is used to derive an OBC applicable when information about the typical period of the motion to be simulated is unavailable. Simple, idealized tests of this period independent OBC demonstrate its ability to afford excellent results, even when the limitations inherent in its derivation are exceeded. Finally, the OBC is applied in more realistic simulations, including Coriolis effects of 2D tidal flows, and is shown to yield excellent results, especially for residual flows. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Estimates of three components of an uncertainty budget for a coastal ocean model in a wind-forced regime are made based on numerical simulations. The budget components behave differently in the shelf regime, inshore of the 200-m isobath, and the slope-interior regime, between the 200-m isobath and a fixed longitude (126°°W) that is roughly 150 km offshore. The first of the three budget components is an estimate of the uncertainty in the ocean state given only a known history of wind stress forcing, with errors in the wind forcing estimated from differences between operational analyses. It is found that, over the continental shelf, the response to wind forcing is sufficiently strong and deterministic that significant skill in estimating shelf circulation can be achieved with knowledge only of the wind forcing, and no ocean data, for wind fields with these estimated errors. The second involves initial condition error and its influence on uncertainty, including both error growth with time from well-known initial conditions and error decay with time from poorly known initial conditions but with well-known wind forcing. The third component is that of boundary condition error and its influence on the interior solutions, including the dependence of that influence on the specific location along the boundary of the boundary condition error. Boundary condition errors with amplitude comparable to the root-mean-square variability at the boundary lead eventually to errors equal to the root-mean-square variability in the slope-interior regime, and somewhat smaller errors in the shelf regime. Covariance estimates based on differences of the wind-forced solutions from the ensemble mean are not dramatically different from those based on the full fields, and do not show strong state dependence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]