LIFECO: Advancement of Hydrodynamic Models: Resolution of frontal variability and key forcing processes

This project is Work Package 1 of the EU funded LIFECO
programme: LInking hydrographic Frontal activity to
ECOsystem dynamics in the North Sea and
Skagerrak - Importance to fish stock recruitment.

Results from two hindcast runs with a regional North
Sea/Baltic Sea model HAMSOM (10km resolution)(HAMburg
Shelf Ocean Model) for the period 1979 to 1993, forced
by the ECMWF re-analysis and for the period 1958-1997,
forced by the NCEP re-analysis are available for the
historic analysis of frontal activity for the proposed
project. The simulations will be extended to cover the
period from 1994-2002 using the ECMWF analysis.

The HAMSOM grid resolution of 10 km is frontal resolving,
but still too coarse to fully resolve the local frontal
processes including eddy development and instabilities.
To accomplish the goals of this work package, the HAMSOM
model, will be modified to incorporate a nested component
with a grid scale of 1 km, as deemed adequate to resolve
frontal processes. The nested domains will be focused on
two frontal regions in the North Sea and Skagerrak,
respectively. Model simulations with the nested model will
be performed for the years 2000 to 2002 as well as for years
with extreme forcing and anomalous ecosystem dynamics.
These simulations will provide distributions of physical
properties and velocity fields to be archived in
WP 7: Database assembly for analysis in WP 8: GIS and Spatial
Data Analysis as well as for the development of indices of
frontal activity for utilisation in WP9: Synthesis, scenario
and hypothesis testing.