Coupled global wind and tide driven coastal water levels and currents in Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands

A high-resolution, unstructured finite element hydrodynamic model was implemented with a focus on the regional dynamics of Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands. Spatial resolution of the unstructured mesh is at least 100 m along all the coastlines of Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands and reaches a resolution finer than 50 m in selected areas with complex coastlines. The model is forced with a global tide solution (TPXO8) and global atmospheric forcing provided by the NCEP Climate Forecast System (CFSv2) model. Inclusion of the global atmospheric forcing resulted in an increase of the model accuracy in modeling water levels. Atmospheric forcing was a necessary condition for the generation of currents and high frequency water level oscillations such as seiches. This newly developed hydrodynamic model for Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands has applications for maritime users as the inclusion of global winds results in more accurate water levels as well as coastal currents, which were not able to be generated previously without the inclusion of atmospheric forcing. In addition, the generation of high frequency oscillations that have been observed in measurements allows for further study of local scale dynamics that have not been able to be previously replicated by numerical models in this region.