High-Resolution Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP) with Data Assimilation over Placentia Bay, Newfoundland

Placentia Bay, Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada contains numerous islands and shoals, and is a busy bay with large marine vessel traffic, fishers and small-craft users. Placentia Bay is second only to the Port of Vancouver in Canada in terms of the annual value of goods shipped. The SmartBay applied ocean observing system, an initiative of the Fisheries and Marine Institute of Memorial University, was created to enhance marine safety for the Placentia Bay user community, and to provide environmental information to improve the efficiency of marine operations in the region. SmartBay successes to date have relied on effective collection and distribution of meteorological and oceanographic information. A recent advance has included the assimilation of these data into ultra-high resolution wind and wave models. Key elements of the work for Placentia Bay have included: configuration of the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) numerical weather prediction model at 2 km resolution; adaptation of the Environment Canada Global Environmental Multiscale (GEM) Local Area Model (LAM), development of a 0.6 km grid resolution WaveWatch III (WW3) deep-water wave model; incorporation of detailed sea surface temperature (SST) analysis data into WRF's input; operational implementation of the Simulating WAves Nearshore (SWAN) shallow-water wave model at 0.5 km resolution; and implementing data assimilation within WRF. The paper focuses on the configuration, development and testing of the wind models, together with discussion of the data assimilation techniques employed and a comparison of results with met-ocean buoy measurements.