Skill Assessment of the MARINA Hydrodynamic Code Using NOAA'S Delaware Bay Estuary Modeling Evaluation Environment (MEE)

The 2D hydrodynamic numerical (HN) model Marina is introduced to simulate physical processes in the Delaware Bay. It was chosen because it is embedded in a complete development environment from pre- to post processing, and it includes a wave and sediment module, which will be necessary for future research. NOAA's Model Evaluation Environment (MEE) for the Delaware River and Bay was used to assess its performance and to compare it to other models. The evaluation is based on two scenarios, an astronomical tide only simulation to show the model's ability to predict tidal dynamics correctly, and a hindcast run during the 1984–1985 National Ocean Service (NOS) circulation survey (Klavans et al., 1986) to show the model's capability of reproducing realistic physical processes throughout the Delaware Bay. The comparison parameters include lime series plots, statistical metrics, and harmonic constituents for water levels and currents. Special attention was given to a comparison of the 2D Marina vs. the 3D FVCOM results with respect to salinity because our ultimate goal are long term simulations with respect to sediment exchange between the bay and the adjacent marshes. Hence, two-dimensional simulations would significantly reduce the computational effort. Overall the results showed good agreement of water levels and currents for both scenarios. In the upper estuary further calibration is still necessary to improve the performance. The quality of salinity results is insufficient in the turbidity zone, as expected due to vertical stratification, but in the well mixed upper estuary and weakly stratified Delaware Bay reasonably good performance was reached.