About SURF

This is the repository of an Relocatable Ocean Modeling platform, called SURF, which will enable the nesting of NEMO and SHYFEM codes into larger scales ocean circulation models. SURF is working on a Virtual Machine Environment where the hydrodynamic model and several pre- and post-processing tools are connected to the numerical outputs and the required inputs fields. At the moment only the SURF-NEMO model is made available while the SURF-SHYFEM will follow later. SURF has build the pre-processing for bathymetry, initial and lateral boundary conditions, the atmospheric forcing and it has a specific namelist interface to NEMO and/or SHYFEM namelist parameters. In the future such namelist could be part of a web-based interface still under construction.

SURF provides a numerical platform for the forecasting of hydrodynamic and thermodynamic fields at high spatial and temporal resolution. It is designed to be embedded in any region of a larger scale ocean prediction system, at coarser resolution, and includes multiple nesting capabilities. For each nesting, the parent coarser grid model fields provides initial and lateral boundary conditions for the SURF child components. The sequential steps executed by the SURF-NEMO numerical platform can be grouped as follows:

• The initialization: the user has to define the simulation configuration parameters for the ocean model in the configuration file (horizontal and vertical grids, subgrid scale parameterizations, etc).
• The access and download of the input datasets: the user has to specify where to find the input data in the configuration file. The input data are the bathymetry, the coastline, the atmospheric forcing and the coarser resolution parent ocean model data.
• The computation grid generation: it is an automatic step, which generates the horizontal and vertical grid for the child model.
• The input data regridding: it is an automatic step, which generates the bottom topography, surface forcing, initial and open lateral boundary conditions datasets on the child grid.
• The Forecast: it is another automatic step, which produces the final outputs
• The Post-processing: this step considers the visualisation and analysis procedures of the forecast and it can be activated after the run execution (i.e. compare parent/child fields, compare the simulation results with insitu or satellite datasets and convert datasets).