Development of an Extratropical Surge and

Tide Operational Forecast System (ESTOFS)

for the Atlantic and Gulf Coasts
Jesse Feyen, Yuji Funakoshi, and Frank Aikman III (NOS/OCS/CSDL)
Hendrik Tolman, Arun Chawla, and Ilya Rivin (NWS/NCEP/EMC)
Arthur Taylor (NWS/MDL)

Office of Coast Survey

ESTOFS Overview
• Purpose
– Basin-wide storm surge model for coupling with
coastal wave models (SWAN or WWIII)
– Add tide in surge predictions
• Lacking in operational Extratropical Storm Surge
(ETSS) model runs
• Can use tidal grids to add to forecaster-generated
surge grids to generate combined field
– Provide multi-model ensemble for extratropical surge
forecast guidance

Office of Coast Survey

ESTOFS Model Overview
• Atlantic and Gulf coasts
• Coastal resolution ≈ 3 km
• Tides from global tide model
• Atmospheric forcing from
GFS
– Winds and sea level pressure
• ADCIRC finite element model
– Community-based
– Unstructured grid
– 2D barotropic solves for water
level and depth-averaged
currents (no temp, salinity)

Office of Coast Survey

Operational Set-up
• Running 4 times per day to match GFS/WWIII cycle
• Total 8 days simulation per cycle
– 12-hr nowcast followed by 180-hr forecast
• Delivers three water level outputs
– Combined Water Level (CWL): surge + tides
– Harmonic Tidal Prediction (HTP): astronomical tides
– Subtidal Water Level (SWL): SWL = CWL – HTP
• ETSS website will include ESTOFS SWL at its
points
• Gridded output both on native grid (NetCDF) and 5
km NDFD CONUS grid (GRIB2)
– NetCDF via http://nomad1.ncep.noaa.gov/pub/raid2/estofs

Office of Coast Survey

Providing Gridded Water Level

ESTOFS Atlantic grid (NetCDF) NDFD CONUS grid (GRIB2)

Office of Coast Survey

Providing Gridded Water Level

EC2001 grid (NetCDF) NDFD CONUS grid (GRIB2)

Office of Coast Survey

Providing Gridded Water Level

EC2001 grid (NetCDF) NDFD CONUS grid (GRIB2)

Office of Coast Survey

Status of ESTOFS transition
• Running semi-operationally on cirrus via cron job
– Uses scripts and code from CO-OPS’ Coastal Ocean
Modeling Framework (COMF) to streamline transition
– Using 1 node (64 logical CPUs), cycle takes 60 mins
• GFS forcing (20 min), run (25 min), process (10 min)
• Skill assessment complete
– 1 year hindcast (2009)
– semi-operational forecast
• Meeting with NCO to schedule transition

Office of Coast Survey

Skill Assessment
Combined Water Level (surge + tide)

Office of Coast Survey

Skill Assessment
ESTOFS SWL versus bias-corrected ETSS

Office of Coast Survey