Development of an Ocean Current Forecast System for the South China Sea

Abstract A multi-grid regional ocean circulation model is established on the basis of ROMS to develop the ocean current forecast system for the South China Sea. The model is first spun up through integration for 15 years with annually cyclic sea surface forcing condition to reach a stationary annually cyclic circulation fields. Then the model is integrated from February 2006 to September 2012 driven by the NCEP reanalysis 6 hourly mean dataset with data assimilation. After being assessed by observation data, the ocean current forecast system is developed and test run since October 2012. At the test run stage, the surface wave induced vertical mixing is incorporated to KPP mixing scheme to improve the upper layer ocean temperature.