Influence of atmospheric forcings on water renewal in harbours.

In this paper, we use observations and numerical simulations to investigate the effect of meteorological parameters such as atmospheric pressure and wind on harbours water exchanges. Knowing these water exchanges is of vital importance to care for and improve the environmental health of the harbor water and its surrounding areas. This knowledge requires an analysis of different meteorological and hydrodynamic parameters from detailed and high definition studies. SAMOA (System of Meteorological and Oceanographic Support for Port Authorities) is a project developed by Puertos de Estado (PdE) in collaboration with several Spanish harbour authorities and Universities to provide enhanced meteorological and oceanographic information and services for harbour operations. In the framework of this project, the Maritime Engineering Laboratory (LIM/UPC) has developed a high-resolution numerical model for the forecasting ocean variables at coastal and harbour scales. The effectiveness of this model to reproduce the hydrodynamics in the ports is evaluated using meteo-oceanographic observations from different measurement campaigns during 2020 2021, and 2022 carried out in the ports. Firstly, this article analyses and validates the results of the SAMOA meteo-oceanographic prediction system in the ports of Huelva, Gijón and Cartagena (mesotidal and microtidal environments) and, secondly, based on the analysis of observations, it proposes the numerical analysis of different events with high renewal times. The data includes information on atmospheric pressure, wind, sea level and currents parameters. These variables are validated by visual matching of the time series of modelled data and observations, as well as by statistical analyses and correlations between model results and measurements.