The Tampa Bay Coastal Ocean Model Nowcast/Forecast System with Ecological Applications

Tampa Bay, the largest of Florida’s coastal plain estuaries and containing the only deep water port on Florida’s west coast, has a surrounding population of about 4 million people. Tampa Bay provides habitat for a wide variety of finfish and shellfish, including serving as a spawning ground for estuarine fish and a settlement site for juvenile reef fish. Thus, for both human and living marine resource reasons, Tampa Bay is highly susceptible to the adverse impacts of harmful algae blooms. Here we report on a very high resolution (as fine as 20 m), Tampa Bay Coastal Ocean Model (TBCOM) that downscales from the deep-ocean, across the continental shelf and into Tampa Bay by nesting the unstructured grid, Finite Volume Community Ocean Model (FVCOM) in the West Florida Coastal Ocean Model (WFCOM), itself an application of FVCOM nested in the Gulf of Mexico Hybrid Coordinate Ocean Model. Both TBCOM and WFCOM are run daily as automated, nowcast/forecast systems. Upon establishing veracity, through model-observation comparisons, several ecological applications are shown.