COSEM - COntaminant Spread in the Eastern Mediterranean

SELIPS: South Eastern Levantine Israeli Prediction System

Model description

SELIPS is a forecasting system meant to produce daily forecasts of temperature, salinity and sea currents in the coastal zone of the south eastern corner of the Levantine Basin.
SELIPS is based on:

POM: a 3D numeriacl model for the simulation of ocean dynamics.
VIFOP: a software package used in SELIPS to reduce the amplitude of numerical waves created during the initialization proccess.

SELIPS is one way nested to ALERMO ( which is nested in turn to MFS ) and forced by the SKIRON atmospheric model.

The development of SELIPS begun with the MFSPP project and continued through the MFSTEP and ECOOP projects. SELIPS is run as part of title="Mediterranean Forecasting System Pilot Project">MFSPP project and continued through the MFSTEP and ECOOP projects. SELIPS is run as part of MONGOOS.

Model Bathymetry

Model Domain	East of 31.5°E South of 33.7°N
Horizontal Resolution	0.01°E x 0.00833°N (roughly 950m)
Vertical Grid	27 sigma layers
Forecast Renge	96 hours starting from 12:00 GMT
Initial Condition	The POM model starts from an ALERMO forecast dataset, optimized by VIFOP. The initialization process is described below
Boundary Condition	Fields of temperature, salinity water current and sea level elevation are taken from ALERMO forecast and used as open radiative boundary conditions.
Atmospheric Forcing	Fields of air temperature, specific humidity, air pressure, wind, total cloud cover and precipitation from SKIRON 0.05° forecasts are used to calculate heat, shortwave radiation, fresh water and momentum fluxes for POM
Assimilated Data	SST through Atmospheric fluxes correction. the product of Copernicus is being used.

Initialization

the model is initialized from the ALERMO first day forecasts datasets which are interpolated and optimized using VIFOP. The resulting temperature, salinity , velocity and elevation fields are used to initialize POM for a 2 day hindcast run. The averaged fields of the last day of the hindcast are either used as the prior for the data assimilation process or as initial condition to the forecast.

Assimilation of satellite altimetry

to be added later