SimOcean
Simulating and forecasting southern Africa's ocean

Operational and system development activities – Phase II

In Phase II, the ocean forecast system, and its products, will be improved and expanded upon. The 5-7 day forecasts will continue to be made available, and in parallel, emphasis during Phase II is placed on system development and research. Enhancements of the forecast system include the implementation of data assimilation techniques, coupling of the ocean current models to atmospheric and ocean wave models, inclusion of additional high resolution nested models of, for example, the Mozambique Channel and the South African East Coast. These additional research and development tasks will be structured into work packages and undertaken as MSc, PhD or Post-doc projects and upon completion, implemented in the operational system. In this manner local capacity in ocean modelling as well as operational implementation is developed, and concurrently the ocean forecast system is continuously improved and kept up to date with cutting edge developments. In addition to enhancing the system an extensive data archive will be developed, including reanalysis data and the generation of long time series data from the model output. Following the successful implementation and enhancement of the ocean forecast system, to become fully operational and sustainable, it will need to be hosted by an operational institute such as MCM, SAWS, or the Navy. Redundancy of the computer system is a major component of an operational ocean forecasting system and is done by duplicating the system, running it in parallel and archiving the data on an backup high performance computer.