Coastal Modeling - Southern California Coastal Ocean Observing System
Original (non-English) name
Acronym
Coastal Modeling - SCCOOS
Citation
Abstract
The coastal zone is defined here as spanning from the offshore continental slope to the shoreline as determined by averaging over the incoming waves (Fig. 1). Its physical circulation phenomena include seasonal and interannual cycles, wind-driven currents, tides, mesoscale eddies (more offshore), submesoscale density fronts and filaments, topographic wakes, internal and inertial waves, surface waves and wave-driven littoral currents, and turbulent boundary layers near the surface and bottom. It is distinctive in many ways from the deeper sea, most conspicuously in its smaller, faster scales of evolution and the greater influence of the proximate bottom in shallow water. As such, it requires special modeling techniques.