Prince William Sound Field Experiment

Why care about
data assimilation?

We must be able to combine and synthesize ocean data in real time so that it has the most use for researchers and end users, such as recreational boaters, commercial fishing fleets, and first responders.


Data Assimilation

principal investigator:
yi chao, nasa jet propulsion laboratory

A major goal of the observing system in Prince William Sound is to develop an operational system that can instantly deliver information on physical and biological conditions.

This information includes raw data on environmental conditions, such as wind speed, air temperature, precipitation, ocean currents, ocean temperature, tide height, and water salinity as well as modeled forecasts of anticipated conditions.

Modeling Ocean Currents

The the UCLA / JPL group has the responsibility of developing a real-time forecasting capability for oceanographic conditions, and will apply the Regional Ocean Modeling System (ROMS) to the Prince William Sound Observing System. ROMS has been used successfully for the California coast and it represents an evolution from the family of terrain-following, vertical coordinate models.

A Pacific basin-scale ROMS has been developed with a resolution of 12.5-km, and will provide the needed boundary conditions for ROMS configurations in the Sound, which consist of three nested ROMS domains with 12-km, 4-km, and 1.3-km grids over the Pacific Northeast, Gulf of Alaska, and the Sound, respectively. We are also in the process of developing a tidal modeling component in ROMS, so the real-time sea level can be predicted in addition to circulation fields.