A Coastal Ocean Prediction System for Tampa Bay, Florida

The USF College of Marine Science has developed a Coastal Ocean Prediction System for Tampa Bay based on an integrated observing system and circulation model as a sub-regional component of the US Integrated Ocean Observing System. The model system ingests real-time observations of the physical forcing functions for Tampa Bay to produce three-dimensional fields of circulation, temperature, salinity, and water level. The hydrodynamic model, based on the ECOM-3D code, is fully operational in either a nowcast-forecast mode or a hindcast mode and is described on our web site (http://ompl.marine.usf.edu/TBmodel). Water level, temperature, salinity, surface heat and moisture fluxes, and winds come from the Tampa Bay Physical Oceanographic Real-Time System (TB-PORTS; http://ompl.marine.usf.edu/ports/ or http://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/tbports/tbports.shtml?port=tb) augmented with observations from the USF Coastal Ocean Monitoring and Prediction System (COWS; http://comps.marine.usf.edu/). Daily river discharge is obtained from the USGS National Water Information System. Precipitation is derived from several gauges operated by the Southwest Florida Water Management District, USGS, and NOAA. The raw observational data undergoes an automated QA/QC procedure before being input into the model. A water quality module has been developed that produces fields of chlorophyll, nutrients, and dissolved oxygen from time-varying estimates of nutrient and fresh water loading. A wave module provides directional wave spectra and bottom stresses based on the SWAN code. The integrated observing and modeling system provides a decision support tool that is used to enhance security, safety, and efficiency of maritime transportation, to guide search and rescue efforts, and to evaluate the bay ecosystem response to environmental stressors. Such stressors include severe storms, seasonal and interannual changes in fresh water input, as well as human impacts, such as hazardous material spills, river withdrawals, nutrient loading, changing land use patterns, and alterations in bay bathymetry. In addition to its routine use by the Tampa Bay Pilots and the US Coast Guard, the Coastal Ocean Prediction System has been used to support management decisions in several environmental issues affecting the bay. For example, the model has been used to investigate the effects of concentrate discharge from a seawater desalination facility recently built on Tampa Bay for the regional water supply authority; to simulate the trajectory of wastewater discharges and hazardous material spills for the Florida Department of Environmental Protection; to predict trajectories of raw sewage spills into the bay for the Pinellas County Health Department; to investigate transport and fate of human pathogens in the bay, and to evaluate changes in salinity and estuarine residence time due to natural variability and to anthropogenic alterations in fresh water input and bathymetry of the bay for the Southwest Florida Water Management District.