Establishment of a Delaware Bay Model Evaluation Environment

The Office of Coast Survey's Coast Survey Development Laboratory (CSDL) within National Ocean Service established a Model Evaluation Environment (MEE) for the Delaware River and Bay and adjacent shelf. The purpose of the MEE was to establish a framework to evaluate available candidate circulation models to support the NOS modeling backbone to provide operational circulation forecasts in U.S. Coastal waterways. The paper describes the various elements that comprise what is needed to establish the MEE. The paper concludes by providing examples of MEE products for the six community models that were evaluated. The six community models include both 2-D and 3-D models that are formulated on both structured (orthogonal) or unstructured (highly variable triangular elements) grids. The models were: the Princeton Ocean Model (POM), the Regional Ocean Model System (ROMS), the Finite Volume Coastal Ocean Model (FVCOM), the Advanced Circulation Model (ADCIRC), the Eulerian-Lagrangian Circulation Model (ELCIRC), and the Semi-implicit Eulerian-Lagrangian Finite Element Model (SELFE).