The General NOAA Operational Modeling Environment (GNOME) – Development and Applications

GNOME (General NOAA Operational Modeling Environment) is a particle tracking model developed and used by NOAA’s Emergency Response Division for modeling oil spill trajectories. Although GNOME has been publicly available as a desktop application for some time, recent program development has improved its utility as a valuable tool for a wide range of applications. These developments include: an open-source code base, a full-featured Python scripting interface, improved transport algorithms, and integration with the ADIOS oil library and oil weathering algorithms.

GNOME is primarily designed to be used in emergency response and therefore it is flexible in inputs for winds and currents. It can use output from numerous operational forecast systems on structured or unstructured (triangular) grids. In addition to forecasting oil movement, GNOME has been employed in a variety of applications including statistical trajectory modeling for response planning in the Arctic and tracking marine debris generated by the 2011 Japan Tsunami.