A Community Terrain-Following Ocean Modeling System (TOMS)


Hernan G. Arango

Institute of Marine and Coastal Sciences, Rutgers University


Tal Ezer

Princeton University


Alexander F. Shchepetkin

Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics, UCLA



An Overview of an ongoing effort to develop a new generation Terrain-following Ocean Modeling System (TOMS) for scientific and operational applications over a wide range of scales from Global to sub-mesoscale will be presented. The current work is part of an expanding collaborative effort involving several groups around the US including theoreticians, developers, testers, and users.

TOMS will include state-of-the-art numerical algorithms and sub grid-scale parameterizations, nesting options, advanced data assimilation schemes, an interface for coupling with atmospheric forecasting models, extensive web-based documentation and users-support software for model set-up, analysis and diagnostics. The system is intended for massive parallel shared- and distributed-memory architectures.