The Coastal Ocean Modeling Testbed project led by Louisiana State University’s Dr. Kevin Xu continues to advance predictive capabilities for the transport and fate of contaminants through the river-estuary-ocean continuum.

The team is working on developing complex computer models that can be applied to simulate and forecast how contaminants or pollutants are likely to move between land and sea under a range of oceanographic and hydrologic conditions.

Major tasks under way include the coupling between a process-based land surface/hydrological model and a 3-D ocean circulation model. Understanding the drivers and processes responsible for the exchange along the freshwater to saltwater continuum is central to estimating how, for example, inundation events might distribute contaminants and influence the potability of drinking water.

Through the efforts of GCOOS Co-Data Manager Felimon Gayanilo, GCOOS is part of the project’s data processing and curation that includes:

• Scientist-generated, IOOS-compliant models (netCDF);
• netCDF model outputs that are uploaded to GCOOS data services;
• Data evaluation and publication in GCOOS ERDDAP Data Service;
• Data archive at NCEI; and
• Data published in the GCOOS/COMT Model Handler facility when applicable.

This video snippet by Daoyang Bao from the Louisiana State University Coupled Ocean Modeling group shows flooding from Hurricane Harvey.