SIROCCO

Coastal ocean modelling

SIROCCO develops and makes available a complete system for coastal ocean modelling: ocean models, assimilation tools, pre- and post-processing tools, global and regional atlases, 3D simulations, specified configurations.

The modeling of coastal and shelf seas concerns a wide variety of dynamic processes, which are influenced by the ocean, continent and atmosphere, and strongly impacted by bathymetry structures (continental shelf, slope, canyons). The scales to be taken into account, both in physics and in forcings, range from a hundred meters to several hundred kilometers, from a few minutes to the inter-annual scale, and the determining interaction of these scales between them (under the effect of strongly non-linear dynamics) is one of the distinctive characteristics of the coastal ocean. This modeling must not only realistically reproduce the dynamics of the coastal ocean, but also be able to interface with the modeling of systems for which the coastal ocean constitutes the ambient environment (biology and marine geochemistry, sediment transport) or with which the coastal ocean will interact with its interfaces (atmosphere, waves, coastline, offshore). Consequently, the coastal-compatible hydrodynamic models can not allow some simplifying assumptions common in so-called offshore models (rigid roof, z-coordinate, hydrostatic hypothesis), and constitute numerical objects of greater complexity. This complexity will continue to increase with the increase in the resolution of the models and the need to couple the different environment mentioned above.

The mission of SIROCCO (Simulations Réalistes de l’OCéan COtier) is to propose numerical tools and products that resolve the issues of coastal seas. More specifically, the SIROCCO service provides the community with several codes and tools developed within the POC (Pôle Océan et Couplage), by researchers and engineers of LEGOS: ocean models (T-UGOm, SYMPHONIE), data assimilation tools (S -DAP, SpEnOI), grid generation and visualization tools (Xscan, POCVIP), as well as pre-processing and analysis tools (ArM, Tidal ToolBox COMODO) and a generic coupling platform with biogeochemical and transport modules sedimentary, compatible with the products of operational oceanography (BLOOM). Several products from these numerical tools are also developed and made available, including fields derived from 3D simulations on regions of interest (for example: simulations of the dispersion of radioactive elements during the Fukushima nuclear accident on demand of IAEA, the FES tide atlases that are used in the operational processing of satellite altimetry missions data).

SIROCCO is an national service of the Research Infrastructure ILICO:

News

The ILICO scientific workshop INTEGRATION on MHWs

The INTEGRATION workshop on marine heat waves, co-organised by the SNOs SIROCCO, COAST-HF, MOOSE and SOMLIT as part of the scientific workshops of the ILICO Research Infrastructure and funded by the Office Français de la Biodiversité (OFB), was held in Toulouse from 26 to 28 June 2023. The workshop provided an opportunity to learn about […]

News

Recent publication: Seasonal and annual budget of dissolved inorganic carbon in the NW Med deep convection area

Researchers from LEGOS, NIOZ, LOV, MIO, Espace-Dev, SCCWRP, LOCEAN, and CEFREM investigated the seasonal to annual cycle and budget of dissolved inorganic carbon in the deep convection area of the north-western Mediterranean, using a coupled physical-biogeochemical model. Their results show that the northwestern Mediterranean Sea’s deep-convection region was a moderate sink of 0.5 mol C […]

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Collaborating with SPC on Kiritimati project

Two 10-years models hindcast at 150 m and 1km resolution In a partnership with The Pacific Community (SPC), SIROCCO has develloped two level simulation at 1km and 150m resolution to produce Hindcast over 10 years (2010-2019) for the oceanic circulation arround Kiritimati island (Republic of Kiribati). The first stage at 1km is forced at the […]

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