Physical Model of the Mississippi Sound and Bight from 2016-07-14 to 2016-10-11 with Low-Passed Meteorological Forcing and Eulerian Dye Tracer Releases for Residence Time Assessment

Model output of circulation, water mass and dynamical properties (currents, temperature, salinity, and sea level) for the Mississippi Bight and Mississippi Sound region of the northern Gulf of Mexico. The model application was developed as part of the GOMRI-funded CONCORDE consortium and has been configured with 400 m horizontal spatial resolution and 24 vertical layers. Observed freshwater input derived from available tide gauge stations are applied as riverine forcing, and Naval Research Laboratory-Naval Coastal Ocean Model (NRL-NCOM) output at 1 km was used as outer boundary condition forcing.

Surface atmospheric forcing is a low-passed (24-hour filtered) version of the 1km hourly product that was also developed as part of the CONCORDE consortium’s modeling component (the CONCORDE Meteorological Analysis- CMA). This filtering removes high-frequency meteorological forcing, such as diurnal sea breeze, allowing for scenario testing that reveals the impact of high-frequency winds on estuarine – shelf exchange. The model output in this dataset provides a daily resolution of physical parameters (currents, temperature, salinity, water levels) for the time frame around the Summer 2016 sampling campaign of the CONCORDE observational teams (2016-07-14 to 2016-10-11). The output provided also has seven regions of Eulerian dye tracer releases. The dye was released over the entire water column with a concentration of 1 for each of the regions: seaward of the Mississippi-Alabama Barrier Islands, seaward of the Chandeleur Barrier Islands, Mississippi Sound, Mississippi Bight, seaward of the Mississippi-Alabama Barrier islands that include the mouth of Mobile Bay, the Chandeleur Sound, and Mobile Bay. The dye was released as a passive tracer whose transport equation is the same as for salt-balance equation involving advective and diffusive transport and source-sink terms and does not influence the density field.