FVCOM
FVCOM is a prognostic, unstructured-grid, Finite-Volume, free-surface, three-dimensional primitive equation Community Ocean Model developed by the University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth (UMASS-D) and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) joint team led by Drs. Changsheng Chen, Robert C. Beardsley, and Geoffrey Cowles. Initially, it was designed to explore and simulate the flooding/drying process over the estuarine-wetland complex, tidal, buoyancy, and wind-driven circulations in the coastal region featured with complex irregular geometry and steep bottom topography. FVCOM has upgraded to be a fully coupled current-ice-wave-sediment-ecosystem model with options for either hydrostatic or non-hydrostatic dynamics and MPI for computational parallelization.
The present version of FVCOM includes several modules, as shown in the figure above. FVCOM-NH: the non-hydrostatic solvers implemented using either pressure correction or projection algorithms. UG-CICE: the ice module converted from the Los Alamos sea ice model Community Ice CodE. FVCOM-SWAVE: the surface wave module converted from the Simulating Wave Nearshore model (SWAN). FVCOM-SED: the sediment module converted from the USGS structured-grid community non-cohesive and cohesive sediment model. FVCOM-GBM: a generalized biological module allowing users to select either a pre-built biological model, such as NPZ, NPZD, etc. or construct their biological model using the pre-defined pool of biological variables and parameterization functions. ERSEM:the European Regional Seas Ecosystem Model developed by Plymouth Marine Laboratory, UK. FVCOM-WQM: the water quality model converted from the US EPA’s Water Quality Analysis Simulation Program (WASP). UG-CE-QUAL-ICM: the water quality model converted from the Army Corps’ CE-QUAL-ICE. UG-RCA: the water quality model converted from HydroQual’s Row Column Advance ecological system modeling program (RCA). Lagrangian-IBM: a three-dimensional individual-based model used to simulate marine fishery larval life cycles. FVCOM-Vegetation: a vegetation module considering effects of vegetation on currents and waves, turbulence mixing, and sediment.
Diffusion and mixing in FVCOM are parameterized by Smagorinsky’s parameterization in the horizontal and the General Ocean Turbulence Model (GOTM) in the vertical, with the 2.5-level Mellor-Yamada (1982) turbulence model as the default.
FVCOM can be configured and executed with various options, as shown in the figure above. These include 1) the Cartesian or spherical coordinate system, 2) the generalized or hybrid vertical coordinates, 3) a wet/dry point treatment, 4) dike/groin construction, 5) various data assimilation schemes including nudging, optimal interpolation (OI), and reduced/ensemble Kalman filters (RRKF and EnKFs), 6) the north polar treatment (for the global application), and 7) various radiation open boundary conditions, 8) one-way or two-way nesting.
As a component of the U.S. NOAA CoastalApp, FVCOM has been coupled with an unstructured grid version of the Wave Watch III (WWIII) through the Earth System Modeling Framework (ESMF). FVCOM has been upgraded with the capability of coupling with an atmospheric model. The ESMF coupler module was coded to couple FVCOM with the Weather Research and Forecasting model (WRF, ARW version 4.3.3). The current version of the FVCOM-WRF coupled system includes wave-current interaction, with an option to run under either hydrostatic or non-hydrostatic conditions. The coupled FVCOM and WRF code is available in FVCOM version 5.0.
FVCOM incorporates an MPI parallelized visualization tool ViSiT, which allows users to monitor model performance during the simulation and post-process the model output data. The Visit is the DOE Oak Ridge National Laboratory model visualization interactive tool with an executive version for FVCOM.
A detailed description of FVCOM is given in the” User Manual” and published papers.
