How to create wind forcing in ROMS?

[youngstor]

Hi,

The wiki ROMS has a very nice documentation on how to create tidal forcing in ROMS (https://www.myroms.org/wiki/index.php/Tidal_Forcing).

I wonder if there is a similar documentation for creating atmospheric forcing (wind forcing, etc) in ROMS?

Any suggestions?
Any comments are truly appreciated.

Thanks,
Mike Y.

[kate]

Tides are simpler than winds in some respects. What sort of winds do you need? For a specific hindcast period or a forecast? What spatial and temporal resolution? The current default for our group is winds from the global MERRA hindcasts for which a colleague has written Python scripts to download and convert to a ROMS-ready format. We then let ROMS do the horizontal interpolations to the ROMS grid.

[youngstor]

Hi Kate,

I am looking for wind forcing for a particular historical period of time (say, daily wind in Jan., 2010) for somewhere on the US west coast. The spatial resolution is approx. a few kilometers.

Do you mind providing some guidance on how your group creates wind forcing?

Many thanks,

Tides are simpler than winds in some respects. What sort of winds do you need? For a specific hindcast period or a forecast? What spatial and temporal resolution? The current default for our group is winds from the global MERRA hindcasts for which a colleague has written Python scripts to download and convert to a ROMS-ready format. We then let ROMS do the horizontal interpolations to the ROMS grid.

[kate]

The MERRA winds are likely not fine enough in space for your needs. You will have to find some product out there that is suitable. Perhaps another reader has a suggestion and a toolbox for dealing with it. Alternately, you can explore the COAWST option and run your own WRF grid on top of the ocean.

Temporally, daily is a bit coarse. MERRA is three-hourly which means we don't have to invent a day-night cycle from the shortwave radiation file, plus it does a better job of tracking storms as they come through the domain.