A Review of the Accomplishments and Plans of the NOAA Coastal Ocean Program (1994) / Chapter Skim
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4 Coastal Hazards
4 Coastal Hazards
Pages 61-80
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From page 61... ...
Taken together, these programs constitute the precursor elements of a unified coastal forecast and analysis system designed to acquire, analyze, and disseminate information on the present and future physical state of the coastal environment. Written reports and plans were made available to pane!
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From page 62... ...
Goals and Objectives The Coastal Hazards theme is evolving into a Coastal Forecast System. The pane' endorses the development of a scientifically valid, operationally useful, and programmatically relevant Coastal Forecast and Analysis System (CFAS)
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From page 63... ...
derivation and testing, as part of the Coastal Winds program, of refine ments that will improve the accuracy of coastal wincis significantly; (3) acquisition by the Tsunami program of bottom pressure data in key regions needed to improve physical understanding of tsunami processes; and
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From page 64... ...
993 COP budget for CoastWatch and Ocean Color, 3°/O for the former Coastal Hazards theme and CFS planning) , the investigators associated with the various programs have been resourceful in leveraging COP support.
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From page 65... ...
COP must organize the transition of mature products, algorithms, and systems from research-oriented development to operations managed by the NOAA line offices. In particular, CoastWatch has developed, tested, marketed, and established a reliable distribution system for a suite of important sea-surface temperature and reflectance products based on satellite measurements.
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From page 66... ...
COP has a clear and unique role within NOAA in identifying and supporting scientific research and development needed to develop such a system, and the adoption of a clear mission statement by the Coastal Hazards theme should help ensure that the different programs within the theme contribute to the overall goal. A coastal forecast and analysis system could provide ocean color and coastal winds data of great utility for coastal fisheries research (including CFE)
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From page 67... ...
. The panel further recommends that the Coastal Forecasting System program having been successful in developing a conceptual design for a coastal forecast and analysis system {CFAS}, now be charged with the evaluation and assessment of the other programs within the Coastal Hazards theme as well as continued planning for the CFAS.
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From page 68... ...
In addition, near-reaI-time coastal forecast efforts such as the Great Lakes Forecast System and the new East Coast Forecast System Feasibility Experiment (both discussed below) rely upon CoastWatch products for portions of their routine input.
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From page 69... ...
Modeling activities include the evaluation and refinement of sophisticated inundation models developed by Japanese scientists, and used in Japan, including tests based on actual recent tsunamis for which adequate data exist. The program has been especially aggressive in acquiring relevant data both from their BPRs and from postinundation site visits.
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From page 70... ...
The Hurricane Winds program is aimed at developing techniques for accurately modeling surface wind fields in hurricanes through real-time data assimilation and analysis. Retrospective analyses are performed in support of these modeling activities, yielding wind fields that are useful for developing and testing storm surge and wave models used in other products of the Coastal Hazards theme.
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From page 71... ...
The nearby presence of land strongly influences the wind field, and the simplified topography used in many large-scale numerical weather prediction models is insufficient in coastal areas; in some instances, spectral truncation of land topography leads to coastal ocean areas being treated as land in the moclels! Despite the economic, sociological, and scientific importance of the near-surface coastal wind field, numerical weather prediction has not placed special emphasis on the accurate prediction of coastal winds.
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From page 72... ...
Near-surface wind speed estimates with broad spatial coverage are available from the DMSP Sea Surface Microwave Imager (SSM/~) microwave radiometer instruments; more recently, wind velocity estimates (both speed and direction)
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From page 73... ...
In the long term, both the Coastal Winds program and the Hurricane Winds program should communicate extensively, and strive for a common mode! of the coastal environment.
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From page 74... ...
Due to technical problems, including the ability of the SeaWiFS color sensor to sample near shore, the SeaWiFS mission launch was delayed by NASA until mid-1 994. The Ocean Color program correctly recognizes that a prominent scientific use of ocean color data involves retrospective analysis, and that such processing and analysis is possible (and will be pursued aggressively by the scientific community)
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From page 75... ...
appears generally to be capable of producing useful estimates of storm surge if provided with accurate predictions of hurricane strength, trajectory, and size. The systematic improvement of hurricane wind field predictions anticipated from the COP Hurricane Winds program should therefore materially improve SLOSH performance.
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From page 76... ...
also encourages NOAA to keep abreast of the excellent research on storm surge modeling ongoing in Europe. In the future, some thought must be devoted to the approach for merging NOAA's storm surge modeling capabilities within the Coastal Forecast System.
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From page 77... ...
for near-surface winds, CoastWatch for thermal data input and product distribution, and the Blumberg-Mellor circulation model) , it provides an excellent proof-of-concept and testbed for future coastal ocean prediction systems.
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From page 78... ...
The CFS program is uniquely suited for developing the requirements for a full, national coastal forecast system and justifies both the scientific and operational requirements and the associated costs. The broad perspective of the CFS activity allows it to identify key short- and {ong-term gaps in ongoing work; in addition, this perspective allows evaluation of the results of other projects in the context of a future forecast system.
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From page 79... ...
The CFS activity has not actively evaluated the products of the other Coastal Hazards programs, nor have they to date addressed issues such as the overlap in approaches for calculating storm-induced sea level rise. The pane!
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From page 80... ...
~ 991 . A Review of the NOAA Coasta/ Ocean Program.
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