A baroclinic tidal forecasting model for the Mediterranean Sea - First validation results

In the framework of the Copernicus Marine Environment Monitoring Service (CMEMS) Mediterranean

Analysis and Forecasting Physical System (MedFS), a specific modeling upgrade has been carried out

by including the main lunisolar tides.

Mediterranean tides, even if characterized by small amplitudes, play an important role on the dynamics

of the Mediterranean sea and the introduction of tides in the hydrodynamic numerical model simulations

represent the first step in the development of a numerical forecasting model that considers explicitly the

tidal dynamics and the mesoscales.

MedFS is an operational system that produces weekly analysis and daily 10-days forecasts of the main

physical fields with a resolution of around 4.5km over the whole Mediterranean basin including the

Atlantic Ocean adjacent area (Clementi et al., 2018).

Baroclinic high resolution numerical experiments have been performed including a tidal potential and

forcing the model at the Atlantic boundaries with tidal elevation downscaled from a global model

FES2014 and tidal velocity derived from the TUGOm (http://sirocco.omp.obsmip.

fr/ocean_models/tugo) ocean hydrodynamic model. The experiments have been carried out

including the 8 most relevant tidal constituents in the Mediterranean Sea, namely M2, S2, K1, O1, K2,

N2, P1 and Q1.

In this work, first results of baroclinic tidal model experiments are presented together with their

validation with respect to insitu and satellite data as well as comparing with available literature studies.

In particular the harmonic analysis of tidal amplitudes and phases highlight the model ability to

correctly represent the tide gauges observations in the whole basin and in the areas of large tidal signal.