Terrain-following Ocean Modeling System (TOMS)
This web page describes an expert Terrain-following Ocean Modeling
System (TOMS) for scientific and Navy operational applications.
The design, development and testing of TOMS is sponsored by the
Office of Naval Research (ONR), Ocean, Atmosphere, and Space Research Division.
The TOMS lead developers are Arango (Rutgers University), Ezer
(Princeton University), and Shchepetkin (UCLA). The steering
executive committee includes Haidvogel (Rutgers University),
McWilliams (UCLA), and Street (Stanford University). This ONR
initiative is part of a larger effort to modernize the ocean
forecasting capabilities of the Navy and includes other developers
representing other modeling communities.
The long-term goal is to design, develop and test an expert
Terrain-following Ocean Modeling System for scientific and
operational applications over a wide range of scales from coastal to
global. The primary focus is to implement the most robust set of
options and algorithms for relocatable coastal forecasting systems.
The system includes accurate and efficient numerical algorithms, a
suite of vertical mixing schemes, interfaces for coupling with
atmospheric forecasting models, multiple levels of nesting and
composed grids, and tangent linear and adjoint algorithms for
variational data assimilation (strong and weak constraint 4DVAR),
ensemble forecasting and stability analysis. The parallel framework
comprises both shared-memory (OpenMP) and distributed-memory (MPI)
paradigms. The system also includes extensive web-based documentation
and user-support software for model set-up, analysis and diagnostics.
Currently, ROMS and TOMS are identical. ROMS remains the scientific
community model while TOMS becomes the operational community model.
ROMS/TOMS is a split-explicit, free-surface, hydrostatic primitive
equation ocean model with horizontal orthogonal curvilinear
coordinates and stretched, terrain-following vertical coordinates.