Forecasting contrasting coastal and estuarine hydrodynamics with OPENCoastS
Graphical abstract
Introduction
Coastal forecast systems provide predictions of environmental variables at time scales of a few days. Environmental variables include water levels, velocities, wave parameters, pollutant concentrations and sediment fluxes. These forecast systems have a wide range of applications in coastal and harbor management (Viegas et al., 2009; Bedri et al., 2014; Oliveira et al., 2015), civil protection (Breivik and Allen, 2008; Fortunato et al., 2017a; Ferrarin et al., 2019; Stokes et al., 2020), navigation (Orseau et al., 2021), military operations and recreation (e.g. windguru.cz, magicseaweed.com). Some of these forecast systems cover spatial scales from oceans and regional seas to coastal regions, using downscaling techniques over structured and unstructured grids (Trotta et al., 2016, 2021). They are developed and operated by research centers, meteorological and hydrographic organizations, harbor administrations and private companies.
In spite of the growing development of coastal forecast systems, their dissemination remains limited by their implementation and maintenance costs. These costs are mostly associated with very specialized human resources, with backgrounds in both numerical modeling and information technologies, and also with dedicated computational resources to guarantee a timely delivery of predictions.
However, several evolutions are paving the way for a drastic increase in the development and adoption of coastal forecast systems. First, higher resolutions, more stable numerical schemes and better parameterizations reduce the need for calibration and the effort required to optimize the numerical parameters. As a result, the skills required from modelers decrease and forecasts become more robust. Second, the growing availability of online near-real time data (e.g., GEBCO, EMODNET), atmospheric forecasts (e.g., GFS, WRF, ARPEGE) and large-scale ocean models (e.g., FES2014, CMEMS, HYCOM) provide free access to the information required to force local forecasts worldwide. Third, large computational infrastructures, both public and commercial, can now provide the computational power to perform demanding simulations without the need to acquire and operate these infrastructures. The European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) and the Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe (PRACE) are examples of such public infrastructures.
A fourth evolution that can drastically reduce the cost of generating and operating coastal forecast systems is automation. The recent development of Web-based platforms that can simultaneously generate and operate coastal modeling systems with minimal human intervention will reduce the cost of forecast systems, thereby fostering their dissemination. Examples of these tools remain scarce in the coastal and ocean communities. WebMARVL (the Virtual Marine Laboratory, Oke et al., 2016), for setting up ocean circulation and wave models, Delft-FEWS, dedicated to hydrological and coastal flood forecasting (Werner et al., 2013), and OPENCoastS, to generate coastal forecast systems for any location in a few minutes (Oliveira et al., 2020) are the most comprehensive platforms available. OPENCoastS is a user-friendly platform supported by EOSC computational services and resources. It is freely available to all users whereas, for instance, WebMARVL is dedicated to the Australian communities. The original version of the platform described in Oliveira et al. (2020) was however limited to simple physics (i.e., 2D depth-averaged shallow water flows). Now it has matured and addresses more complex flows, including wave and currents interactions and 3D baroclinic flows. The only inputs requested to the users to set up a new deployment are the horizontal grid file and, for the 3D runs, also the vertical grid. The platform is maintained in operation through the use of European Open Science cloud (EOSC) resources and forecasts still take only a few minutes to generate.
This paper aims at demonstrating how forecast systems built using the OPENCoastS service can provide accurate prediction of complex flows in estuarine and coastal environments. “Complex flows” refer here to flows associated with extreme atmospheric events, breaking waves, and strong density gradients, and at scales ranging from tens of meters to thousands of kilometers. Four demonstration examples are presented herein that cover various spatial scales (from basin-wide to estuarine scales), different forcing agents (tides, waves, river flow, wind and atmospheric pressure), applied in distinct geographies (European and Asian coasts). These examples address different scientific questions (e.g., coastal inundation, salinity dynamics in estuaries) and the forcing agents include tides, waves, river flow, wind and atmospheric pressure. The criteria behind the selection of the applications are summarized in Table 1. The evolution of the platform, from its original version to its present capabilities, is also detailed to promote the usage of the service software by other teams. It is now freely available under licence Apache License Version 2.0 at https://gitlab.com/opencoasts/eosc-hub/webportal.
The paper is organized as follows. First, the OPENCoastS platform is briefly described, with an emphasis on the most recent features. Then, the capabilities of the platform to support operational management in coastal systems are demonstrated through four examples of application. In section 3, these examples are used to illustrate and discuss the lessons learned from the first three years of development of OPENCoastS. Finally, the potential and the present limitations of OPENCoastS are discussed and its evolution is anticipated.
Section snippets
Overview of the OPENCoastS service
The OPENCoastS service provides accurate circulation forecasts in any coastal system of choice (Oliveira et al., 2020). This is achieved through the use of the process-comprehensive suite of numerical models provided by SCHISM (Zhang et al., 2016), and of a complex computational web platform. SCHISM was chosen because it encompasses all relevant processes, and the web platform was built to run it seamlessly and automates the whole prediction workflow. This combination provides the users the
Extreme water levels in the coast of Taiwan
The northwestern Pacific Ocean is the most active tropical cyclone basin on Earth (Elsner and Liu, 2003). The most severe of these cyclones, locally known as typhoons, can generate extreme storm surges that can have devastating effects on the shores of the Philippines, China, Taiwan and Japan. Here, we illustrate the generation of a forecast system for the coast of Taiwan with OPENCoastS and its validation using only publicly available data.
Typhoon tracks can be divided into three groups (
Discussion, conclusions and future perspectives
Over the past three years, OPENCoastS has grown from an innovative on-demand platform that addressed simple 2D barotropic forecasts to a powerful tool that solves all circulation options, used by over 400 users and applied on all continents. Most past applications are scientific ones, to understand the importance of processes at a site or to explore the influence of numerical and physical parameters or forcing sources on forecasts, among other goals. Several deployments were also built to
Declaration of competing interest
The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.
Acknowledgements
This work was funded by the European Commission through the H2020 projects EOSC-hub (Grant Agreement No 777536) and EOSC-Synergy (Grant Agreement No 857647), by Lisboa2020 Operational Program through the INCD project (LISBOA-01-0145-FEDER-022153) and by the Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia through projects MOSAIC.pt (PTDC/CTA-AMB/28909/2017) and AQUAMON (PTDC/CCI-COM/30142/2017). This work made use of results produced with the support of the Portuguese National Grid Initiative; more
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