A flexible infrastructure for coastal ocean and inland hydrology models coupling

We are developing a coupled application that enables flexible interaction of coastal ocean and inland hydrology models. The application include interfaces to numerical weather prediction, ocean coastal hydrodynamic, inland hydrology and surface wave models. Each of these models (components) in the coupled application is wrapped by a software layer (i.e. cap) that enables the components to communicate seamlessly with each other. All the model components advertise their requested (to import) and available (to export) fields at the run time and connect to each other for exchanging data based on the availability of the advertised fields. Coastal ocean, wave and numerical weather prediction models can operate on structured or unstructured computational grids. The regridding capability provided by NOUPC/ESMF infrastructures guarantees correct data interpolation and exchange for connected fields among the model components. The inland hydrology model provides stream flow rates (i.e. discharge) and locally generated runoff on a defined stream network. The match between available location stream advertised by inland hydrology (to export) and requested location stream by coastal ocean model (to import) will be determined and get connected to facilitate the coupling during the coupled application simulation. We will present our progress on evaluating consequences of the compound inland-coastal flooding in the coastal inundation for Hurricane Irene simulation. We will also lay out our plan for extending the implemented capabilities for the entire U.S. Atlantic coast.