Coastal Rapid Environmental Assessment in the Northern Adriatic Sea

Abstract

A new Coastal Rapid Environmental Assessment (CREA) methodology, based on an operational regional forecasting system and coastal monitoring networks of opportunity, has been developed and successfully applied to the Northern Adriatic Sea. The methodology aims at improving the initial condition estimates by combining operational coarse model fields with coastal observations to improve medium to short range predictability which is required by coastal zone and emergency management. The CREA modeling framework system consists of a high resolution, O(800 m), Adriatic SHELF model (ASHELF) nested into the Adriatic Forecasting System (AFS) at 2.2 km resolution. The CREA observational system is composed of coastal networks sampling the water column temperature and salinity between depths of 5 and 40 m. The initialization technique blends the AFS fields with the available observations using a multi-input, multi-scale optimal interpolation technique and a spin-up period for the high resolution ASHELF model to dynamically adjust initial conditions from the coarser resolution AFS model. The high resolution spin up period has been investigated through a dedicated set of experiments and it was found that a week time is enough to have new energetic features in the model initial condition field estimates to be blended with observations.