The South Atlantic Bight MM5 is configured with regional, local and estuarine computational domains with horizontal resolutions of 27, 9, and 3 km, respectively (see figure below). The regional domain consists of 65x65 grid points (area: 1728x1728 square kilometers), the local domain includes 133x133 grid points (1188x1188 square kilometers), and the estuarine domain contains 85x97 grid points (252x288 square kilometers). A pressure-defined sigma-coordinate transformation is used in the vertical. This is a terrain-following system in which sigma-levels follow the terrain near the bottom, gradually flattening as the pressure decreases and remain flat in the upper atmosphere. A total of 31 sigma-levels were specified for all regional, local and estuarine domains and the thickness of each layer depends on the reference-state pressure, finer in the surface boundary layer than in the upper atmosphere. The thickness of the surface layer is 20 m. |
D01, D02 and D03 represent the regional, local and estuarine computational domains, respectively. Blue filled dots are locations of the C-MAN stations and yellow filled triangles are the location of the NOAA meteorological buoys. The meteorological data with hourly time intervals are nudged into the model run to merge the computed field to the observational field. This nudging assimilation approach ensure the relative reality and accuracy of the model-predicted meteorological field and make it useful for the coastal and estuarine application.
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