Weisberg Robert H.

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Weisberg
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Robert H.
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  • Article
    Coastal ocean wind fields gauged against the performance of an ocean circulation model
    (American Geophysical Union, 2004-07-17) He, Ruoying ; Liu, Yonggang ; Weisberg, Robert H.
    Atmosphere model-derived flux fields are used to force coastal ocean models. Coarse resolution and incomplete boundary layer dynamics limit the accuracy of these forcing fields and hence the performance of the ocean models. We address this limitation for the west Florida shelf using optimal interpolation to blend winds measured in situ with winds produced by model analyses. By improving the coastal wind field we improve the fidelity between currents modeled and currents observed. Comparisons between momentum analyses performed independently from the model and the data demonstrate the fidelity to be of a correct dynamical basis. We conclude that the primary limitation to coastal ocean model performance lies with the boundary conditions.
  • Article
    Sea surface temperature patterns on the West Florida Shelf using growing hierarchical self-organizing maps
    (American Meteorological Society, 2006-02) Liu, Yonggang ; Weisberg, Robert H. ; He, Ruoying
    Neural network analyses based on the self-organizing map (SOM) and the growing hierarchical self-organizing map (GHSOM) are used to examine patterns of the sea surface temperature (SST) variability on the West Florida Shelf from time series of daily SST maps from 1998 to 2002. Four characteristic SST patterns are extracted in the first-layer GHSOM array: winter and summer season patterns, and two transitional patterns. Three of them are further expanded in the second layer, yielding more detailed structures in these seasons. The winter pattern is one of low SST, with isotherms aligned approximately along isobaths. The summer pattern is one of high SST distributed in a horizontally uniform manner. The spring transition includes a midshelf cold tongue. Similar analyses performed on SST anomaly data provide further details of these seasonally varying patterns. It is demonstrated that the GHSOM analysis is more effective in extracting the inherent SST patterns than the widely used EOF method. The underlying patterns in a dataset can be visualized in the SOM array in the same form as the original data, while they can only be expressed in anomaly form in the EOF analysis. Some important features, such as asymmetric SST anomaly patterns of winter/summer and cold/warm tongues, can be revealed by the SOM array but cannot be identified in the lowest mode EOF patterns. Also, unlike the EOF or SOM techniques, the hierarchical structure in the input data can be extracted by the GHSOM analysis.
  • Article
    U.S. IOOS coastal and ocean modeling testbed : inter-model evaluation of tides, waves, and hurricane surge in the Gulf of Mexico
    (John Wiley & Sons, 2013-10-08) Kerr, Patrick C. ; Donahue, Aaron S. ; Westerink, Joannes J. ; Luettich, Richard A. ; Zheng, L. Y. ; Weisberg, Robert H. ; Huang, Y. ; Wang, H. V. ; Teng, Y. ; Forrest, D. R. ; Roland, Aron ; Haase, A. T. ; Kramer, A. W. ; Taylor, A. A. ; Rhome, J. R. ; Feyen, J. C. ; Signell, Richard P. ; Hanson, J. L. ; Hope, M. E. ; Estes, R. M. ; Dominguez, R. A. ; Dunbar, R. P. ; Semeraro, L. N. ; Westerink, H. J. ; Kennedy, A. B. ; Smith, J. M. ; Powell, M. D. ; Cardone, V. J. ; Cox, A. T.
    A Gulf of Mexico performance evaluation and comparison of coastal circulation and wave models was executed through harmonic analyses of tidal simulations, hindcasts of Hurricane Ike (2008) and Rita (2005), and a benchmarking study. Three unstructured coastal circulation models (ADCIRC, FVCOM, and SELFE) validated with similar skill on a new common Gulf scale mesh (ULLR) with identical frictional parameterization and forcing for the tidal validation and hurricane hindcasts. Coupled circulation and wave models, SWAN+ADCIRC and WWMII+SELFE, along with FVCOM loosely coupled with SWAN, also validated with similar skill. NOAA's official operational forecast storm surge model (SLOSH) was implemented on local and Gulf scale meshes with the same wind stress and pressure forcing used by the unstructured models for hindcasts of Ike and Rita. SLOSH's local meshes failed to capture regional processes such as Ike's forerunner and the results from the Gulf scale mesh further suggest shortcomings may be due to a combination of poor mesh resolution, missing internal physics such as tides and nonlinear advection, and SLOSH's internal frictional parameterization. In addition, these models were benchmarked to assess and compare execution speed and scalability for a prototypical operational simulation. It was apparent that a higher number of computational cores are needed for the unstructured models to meet similar operational implementation requirements to SLOSH, and that some of them could benefit from improved parallelization and faster execution speed.
  • Article
    Coastal ocean circulation influences on remotely sensed optical properties : a West Florida Shelf case study
    (Oceanography Society, 2004-06) Weisberg, Robert H. ; He, Ruoying ; Kirkpatrick, Gary ; Muller-Karger, Frank E. ; Walsh, John J.
    Satellite-sensed ocean optical features are derived from a combination of factors, including the concentration of water properties by the ocean circulation and the modifications of these properties by biological and chemical processes. To demonstrate the role of the ocean circulation, we consider a case study on the upwelling of anomalously cold, nutrient-rich water and a related sea-surface temperature pattern that was observed on the West Florida Shelf. We use in situ data and a numerical model simulation to show how this pattern evolved in time and space and to draw a connection between a narrow band of cold water observed at the coast and the origin of this water a few hundred kilometers away at the shelf break via shoreward and southward advection within the bottom frictional (Ekman) boundary layer.