The Hybrid Coordinate Ocean Model (HYCOM) is implemented for the Hawaiian Islands region at a horizontal resolution of 1/25°. The open lateral boundaries are forced by output from the HYCOM Consortium's real-time global ocean prediction system. The vertical resolution of the regional HYCOM is the same as the global HYCOM: 32 layers in all with the upper 28 layers active in the Hawaii region. For surface forcing, output from a high-resolution (0.056°) regional atmospheric forecast system based on WRF-ARW is used. No data assimilation is included in the regional model at present.
This link serves model output in a forecast mode. It is initialized with the ocean state of the global HYCOM 15 days or more prior to the date when the forecast is made, and integrated to 28 days ahead of the forecast date. The open boundary forcing (global HYCOM) and surface forcing (WRF_ARW) are kept constant from the respective last forecast dates of the two products (5 days for the global HYCOM and 7 days for the WRF_ARW).
The forecast is updated once a week on Thursday. On a Thursday, model output is available from the Thursday two weeks earlier to the Thursday 4 weeks later, thus 43 days are served in total. Model results on the first Thursday may be checked against satellite observations such as AVISO and GOES served at http:/oceanwatch.pifsc.noaa.gov/.
Original model layer variables are interpolated onto 33 z-levels before being made available on the APDRC server.