Targeted coastal circulation phenomena in diagnostic analyses and forecasts

Oceanography is moving toward the construction of operational observing systems in coastal regions. The essential system design scheme is widely distributed measurements assimilated in computational simulation models, from which a variety of analysis products and forecasts are extracted and publicly disseminated. The detailed specifications for this system must be tested against the relevant oceanic phenomena. This essay surveys coastal physical phenomena in two categories. The more familiar ones are external tides, storm surges, river plumes, coastal topographic waves, upwelling and alongshore boundary currents, mesoscale instability eddies, and topographic contour currents and standing meanders. The phenomena with more recent attention are internal tides, surface fronts, submesoscale vortices, wakes, and littoral currents. Some illustrations are drawn from model simulations made without the aid of data assimilation.