Activation of the operational ecohydrodynamic model (3-D CEMBS) – the hydrodynamic part

Abstract. The paper presents a description of the hydrodynamic part of the coupled ice-ocean model that also includes ecosystem predictive model for evaluation of the condition of the marine environment and the Baltic ecosystem, as well as a preliminary empirical verification of the operational hydrodynamic model based on the POP code in order to determine the consistence between the results obtained from the model and experimental results for the sea surface temperature.

The current Baltic Sea model is based on the Community Earth System Model (CESM from NCAR – National Center for Atmospheric Research). CESM was adopted for the Baltic Sea as a coupled sea-ice model. It consists of the Community Ice Code (CICE model, version 4.0) and the Parallel Ocean Program (POP, version 2.1). The models are coupled through the coupler (CPL7), which is based on the Model Coupling Toolkit (MCT) routines. The current horizontal resolution is about 2 km (1/48 degrees). The ocean model has 21 vertical levels. The driver time step is 1440 s and it is also coupling the time step. The ocean model time step is about 480 s (8 min). Currently, the model is forced by fields from the European Center for Medium Weather Forecast. In the operational mode, 48-h atmospheric forecasts are used, which are supplied by the UM model of the Interdisciplinary Centre for Mathematical and Computational Modelling of the Warsaw University. The model of the marine ecosystem is the right tool for monitoring the state and bioproductivity of the marine ecosystem and forecasting the physical and ecological changes in the studied basin.