The Princeton Ocean Model (POM) is a community general

numerical model Computer simulation is the process of mathematical modelling, performed on a computer, which is designed to predict the behaviour of, or the outcome of, a real-world or physical system. The reliability of some mathematical models can be dete ...

for

ocean circulation An ocean current is a continuous, directed movement of sea water generated by a number of forces acting upon the water, including wind, the Coriolis effect, breaking waves, cabbeling, and temperature and salinity differences. Depth contours, ...

that can be used to simulate and predict oceanic currents, temperatures,

salinities Salinity () is the saltiness or amount of salt dissolved in a body of water, called saline water (see also soil salinity). It is usually measured in g/L or g/kg (grams of salt per liter/kilogram of water; the latter is dimensionless and equal ...

and other water properties.

Development

The model code was originally developed at

Princeton University Princeton University is a private research university in Princeton, New Jersey. Founded in 1746 in Elizabeth as the College of New Jersey, Princeton is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and one of the ...

(G. Mellor and Alan Blumberg) in collaboration with Dynalysis of Princeton (H. James Herring, Richard C. Patchen). The model incorporates the Mellor–Yamada turbulence scheme developed in the early 1970s by George Mellor and Ted Yamada; this turbulence sub-model is widely used by oceanic and atmospheric models. At the time, early computer ocean models such as the Bryan–Cox model (developed in the late 1960s at the

Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory The Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (GFDL) is a laboratory in the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research (OAR). The current director is Dr. Venkatachalam Ramaswamy. It is one of se ...

, GFDL, and later became the Modular Ocean Model, MOM)), were aimed mostly at coarse-resolution simulations of the large-scale ocean circulation, so there was a need for a numerical model that can handle high-resolution coastal ocean processes. The Blumberg–Mellor model (which later became POM) thus included new features such as free surface to handle tides, sigma vertical coordinates (i.e., terrain-following) to handle complex topographies and shallow regions, a curvilinear grid to better handle coastlines, and a turbulence scheme to handle vertical mixing. At the early 1980s the model was used primarily to simulate estuaries such as the Hudson–Raritan Estuary (by Leo Oey) and the

Delaware Bay Delaware Bay is the estuary outlet of the Delaware River on the northeast seaboard of the United States. It is approximately in area, the bay's freshwater mixes for many miles with the saltwater of the Atlantic Ocean. The bay is bordered inland ...

(Boris Galperin), but also first attempts to use a sigma coordinate model for basin-scale problems have started with the coarse resolution model of the

Gulf of Mexico The Gulf of Mexico ( es, Golfo de México) is an ocean basin and a marginal sea of the Atlantic Ocean, largely surrounded by the North American continent. It is bounded on the northeast, north and northwest by the Gulf Coast of the United ...

(Blumberg and Mellor) and models of the Arctic Ocean (with the inclusion of ice-ocean coupling by Lakshmi Kantha and Sirpa Hakkinen). In the early 1990s when the web and browsers started to be developed, POM became one of the first ocean model codes that were provided free of charge to users through the web. The establishment of the POM users group and its web support (by Tal Ezer) resulted in a continuous increase in the number of POM users which grew from about a dozen U.S. users in the 1980s to over 1000 users in 2000 and over 4000 users by 2009; there are users from over 70 different countries. In the 1990s the usage of POM expands to simulations of the

Mediterranean Sea The Mediterranean Sea is a sea connected to the Atlantic Ocean, surrounded by the Mediterranean Basin and almost completely enclosed by land: on the north by Western and Southern Europe and Anatolia, on the south by North Africa, and on the ...

(Zavatarelli) and the first simulations with a sigma coordinate model of the entire Atlantic Ocean for

climate research Climatology (from Greek , ''klima'', "place, zone"; and , '' -logia'') or climate science is the scientific study of Earth's climate, typically defined as weather conditions averaged over a period of at least 30 years. This modern field of stu ...

(Ezer). The development of the Mellor–Ezer optimal interpolation

data assimilation Data assimilation is a mathematical discipline that seeks to optimally combine theory (usually in the form of a numerical model) with observations. There may be a number of different goals sought – for example, to determine the optimal state es ...

scheme that projects surface satellite data into deep layers allows the construction of the first ocean forecast systems for the Gulf Stream and the U.S. east coast running operationally at the NOAA's National Weather Service (Frank Aikman and others). Operational forecast system for other regions such as the Great Lakes, the

(Oey), the

Gulf of Maine , image = , alt = , caption = , image_bathymetry = GulfofMaine2.jpg , alt_bathymetry = , caption_bathymetry = Major features of the Gulf of Maine , location = Northeast coast of the ...

(Huijie Xue) and the

Hudson River The Hudson River is a river that flows from north to south primarily through eastern New York. It originates in the Adirondack Mountains of Upstate New York and flows southward through the Hudson Valley to the New York Harbor between N ...

(Blumberg) followed. For more information on applications of the model, see the searchable database of over 1800 POM-related publications.

Derivatives and other models

In the late 1990s and the 2000s many other terrain-following community ocean models have been developed; some of their features can be traced back to features included in the original POM, other features are additional numerical and parameterization improvements. Several ocean models are direct descendants of POM such as the commercial version of POM known as the estuarine and coastal ocean model (ECOM), the navy coastal ocean model (NCOM) and the finite-volume coastal ocean model ( FVCOM). Recent developments in POM include a generalized coordinate system that combines sigma and z-level grids (Mellor and Ezer), inundation features that allow simulations of wetting and drying (e.g., flood of land area) (Oey), and coupling ocean currents with surface waves (Mellor). Efforts to improve turbulent mixing also continue (Galperin, Kantha, Mellor and others).

Users' meetings

POM users' meetings were held every few years, and in recent years the meetings were extended to include other models and renamed the International Workshop on Modeling the Ocean (IWMO). List of meetings: *1. 1996, June 10–12, Princeton, NJ, USA (POM96) *2. 1998, February 17–19, Miami, FL, USA (POM98) *3. 1999, September 20–22, Bar Harbor, ME, USA (SigMod99) *4. 2001, August 20–22, Boulder, CO, USA (SigMod01) *5. 2003, August 4–6, Seattle, WA, USA (SigMod03) *6. 2009, February 23–26, Taipei, Taiwan (1st IWMO-2009) *7. 2010, May 24–26, Norfolk, VA, USA (2nd IWMO-2010; IWMO-2010) *8. 2011, June 6–9, Qingdao, China (3rd IWMO-2011; IWMO-2011) *9. 2012, May 21–24, Yokohama, Japan (4th IWMO-2012

*10. 2013, June 17–20, Bergen, Norway (5th IWMO-2013

*11. 2014,June 23–27, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada (6th IWMO-2014

*12. 2015, June 1–5, Canberra, Australia (7th IWMO-2015

. *13. 2016, June 7–10, Bologna, Italy (8th IWMO-201

. *14. 2017, July 3–6, Seoul, South Korea (9th IWMO-201

. *15. 2018, June 25–28, Santos, Brazil (10th IWMO-201

. *16. 2019, June 17–20, Wuxi, China (11th IWMO-201

. *17. 2020, June 15–19, Hamburg, Germany (12th IWMO-202

. Reviewed papers from the IWMO meetings are published by ''Ocean Dynamics'' in special issues (IWMO-2009 Part-I, IWMO-2009 Part-II, IWMO-2010, IWMO-2011, IWMO-2012, IWMO-2013, IWMO-2014Oey, L.-Y., T. Ezer, J. Sheng, F. Chai, J. Gan, K. Lamb and Y. Miyazawa (2016), Editorial – The 6th International Workshop on Modeling the Ocean (IWMO 2014), Ocean Dynamics, doi:10.1007/s10236-016-1028-x.).

References

External links

POM-WEB page (registration and information)MPI-POM and Taiwan Ocean Prediction (TOP)
{{Physical oceanography Physical oceanography Earth sciences Numerical climate and weather models