Observing and forecasting coastal currents: Texas Automated Buoy System (TABS)

The Texas Automated Buoy System operates buoys at seven sites off the Texas coast from Brownsville to Sabine in water depths ranging from ten to one hundred meters. The system is supported by the Texas General Land Office as part of its mission to mitigate the effect of catastrophic oil spills on the Texas Coast. Buoys communicate surface currents and water temperature measured at 2m depth in near real time via cell phone and commercial satellite digital data links. One buoy located at East Flower Garden Banks has a 300 kHz ADCP, a meteorology package with an ultrasonic acoustic wind velocity sensor, and a conductivity sensor. Data are posted regularly to a Web page http://www.gerg.tamu.edu/tglo and are available to the public and governments within a few hours after data collection. On the TABS Web page, a graphical map presentation of TABS current vectors has links to data tables and historical databases. Links are also provided to other data resources for oceanographic data in the Gulf of Mexico. Also on the Web page are links to an automated continental shelf forecast system that predicts currents over the Texas-Louisiana shelf on an operational basis. There are four major components in this system: (1) forecast wind field retrieving and preparation, (2) shelf circulation model module, (3) simulation plotting module and (4) Web display and file transfer module. The wind field used is a 3-hour interval ETA-22 forecast gridded wind from NOAA NCEP based on 00, 06, 12, and 18UTC model runs. The shelf circulation model is a 3-D version of Princeton Ocean Model (POM) on a domain extending from the coast to a curved line extending from 25/spl deg/N on the Mexican coast to 85/spl deg/W at the coastline of Florida. The operational POM model used at this time is a simplified barotropic version that permits us to reduce computational time to allow prediction of surface currents twenty-four hours into the future. The data vs. model comparison from April through December, 1999 of nine nearshore TABS buoys indicates modest skill of the model in predicting the wind driven circulation. A fully baroclinic version of TABS-POM model is undergoing tests and will be implemented on an operational basis when sufficient computational resources become available. We are also developing data-assimilating models of the whole Gulf of Mexico and beyond to couple to our shelf model to supply outer boundary conditions.