High-resolution Ocean Hydro-thermodynamics of the Brazilian Tropical Atlantic (HOH-BRAT)

ROMS is is a free-surface, terrain-following coordinate model with split-explicit time stepping, Boussinesq and hydrostatic approximations. We used the AGRIF version of it which allows the nesting of various grids ones into the others, thus increasing their individual resolutions. At the lateral boundary and initial conditions all variables were constrained by the monthly mean of the WOA2009 and the surface forcings were obtained from the monthly mean climatology of the COADS05 dataset. For the river discharge, we took advantage of the climatology of Dai and Trenberth [2002], while tides were extracted from the TPXO7 satellite product. Finally the bathymetry was derived from the ETOPO2 database with 2 min of resolution. For the parent-grid two configurations (‘Tdal’ and ‘No-Tide’) were run at mesoscale-resolving resolution (1/12°) while the nested simulations were run at the submesoscale-permitting resolution of 1/36° over the Sao Francisco and Parnaiba estuaries.