Coastal Ocean and Shelf Seas (COSS-TT)

The COSS-TT is led by the co-chairs:

• Villy Kourafalou, University of Miami/ RSMAS, USA
• Pierre De Mey-Frémaux, CNRS/LEGOS, France
• Alexander Kurapov, NOAA, USA
• Joanna Staneva, Hereon, Germany

Objectives

The COSS-TT aims to advance science and expertise in coastal regions in support of two categories of ocean forecasting systems.  First of all, obviously and centrally, the TT address Regional/Coastal Ocean Forecasting Systems (R/COFS), at several stages of development (scientific concept, pre-operational, operational).  However the TT also addresses the scientific and expert needs of Large-scale Ocean Forecasting Systems (LOFS), as long as they have stakes in coastal regions and shelf seas and/or as they aim to provide initial/boundary conditions for coastal models as part of downscaling or upscaling services.

Six international coordination meetings (2012-2018) have helped define broad priority topics where science and expertise are needed for those systems:

• Monitoring of physical and biogeochemical parameters in coastal regions (in particular permanent/long-term), including linking with the active regional/coastal altimetry community and discussing how altimetry can improve the forecast quality and enable new applications in the regional/coastal oceans
• Development of fine-scale coastal ocean models
• Model-observations synergy in the coastal ocean:
  • Using observations to guide coastal model development and assessment
  • Using models to connect and interpret sparse coastal observations
  • Using coastal models to synthesize observations (data assimilation, machine learning)
  • Using models to design and optimize coastal observing systems (OSE, OSSE, array design)
• Downscaling the ocean estimation problem from large-scale to coastal-scale models, data and forcings,
• Coastal-scale atmosphere-waves-ocean couplings
• Ecosystem response to the physical drivers
• Risk assessment in the coastal ocean, including probabilistic and AI approaches, e.g. regarding extreme events.

The Task Team will continue to address these topics at future meetings, through special Activities, and in collaboration with other Task Teams.

Activities

Some COSS-TT activities are listed below:

• Six task team meetings have been organized between 2012-2018 to share science and good practices, promote international networking and advance strategic planning.
• A Coastal System Information Table has been compiled.
• Six special sessions have been sponsored by the Task Team at AGU/Ocean Sciences Meetings (2008-2018); these have consolidated the outcomes of the TT workshops and allowed outreach to the broader scientific community. Most recent session: AGU-OSM / Portland, OR, USA / Feb 2018.
• Two synthetic COSS Community papers from the 2013 Symposium have been published in Journal of Operational Oceanography.
• We initiated the ARCOM initiative (Altimetry for Regional and Coastal Models) as a common activity between the TT and the CAW (Coastal Altimetry Workshop, http://www.coastalaltimetry.org , P. Cipollini). ARCOM co-chairs: C. Dufau (CLS) and J. Wilkin (Rutgers U.).
• COSS-TT members contributed to the 25th Altimetry workshop in Azores (Oct. 2018): http://www.altimetry2018.org
• COSS-TT co-chairs first-authored or co-authored several OceanObs (Honolulu, Sept. 2019) papers (De Mey-Frémaux et al., 2019; Davidson et al., 2019; Ponte et al., 2019)
• We initiated an activity with the IV-TT: Class 4-based intercomparison of LOFS and R/COFS.
• COSS-TT co-chairs are also members of the DA-TT and OSEval-TT.
• The first COSS Topical Collection of 15 papers has been published in Ocean Dynamics, with presentations from TT meetings. The second COSS Topical Collection is in progress.
• Co-chair V. Kourafalou is a Member of  JCOMM’s Inter-programme Expert Team on “Integrated Marine Meteorological and Oceanographic Services within WMO and IOC Information Systems” (IPET-MOIS); co-chaired by Eugene Burger (NOAA, USA) and Youlong Liu (NMDIS, China).
• Both COSS-TT co-chairs are members of the org Steering Committee (an initiative proposed within the framework of the United Nations Decade of Ocean Science).

Last updated – 10 October 2020

Projects

The COSS-TT co-chairs are strongly involved in CoastPredict, a UN Decade programme proposed by the international coastal community as a contribution to ‘the science we need for the ocean we want’.

Last updated – 10 October 2020

Members

Latest update: Dec 2024

Patron champions:

Pierre-Yves Le Traon, Ifremer/Mercator Ocean, France

Meetings

One major aspect of the COSS-TT is the provision of a communication and collaboration space for the COSS community in the form of meetings. This has been proven to be very successful and has seen a consistent increase in participation.

During the Covid pandemic all meetings are held online as virtual events.

Since 2012, the COSS-TT held six F2F meetings

Meeting history (under GODAE OceanView)

→ Meeting 2018 (Madrid)

→ Meeting 2017 (Cape Town)

→ Meeting 2015 (Lisbon)

→ Meeting 2014 (Puerto Rico)

→ Meeting 2013 (Lecce, Italy)

→ Meeting 2012 (Miami, USA)

Documents

Meeting reports:

• Report from the 6th COSS-TT meeting, Madrid, Spain, Sep 2018
• Report from the 5th COSS-TT meeting, Cape Town, South Africa, April 2017
• Report from the 4th COSS-TT meeting, Lisbon, Portugal, Sep 2015
• Report from the 3rd COSS-TT meeting, Puerto Rico, January 2014
• Report from the 2nd COSS-TT meeting, Lecce, Italy, February 2013
• Report from the 1st COSS-TT meeting, Miami, USA, January 2012

Last updated – 10 October 2020

COSS-TT System Information Table (SIT)

The latest update (xlsx-file) of the COSS-TT system information table or SIT is the collection of the coastal forecasting and analysis systems represented in the Coastal & Shelf Seas Task Team.

The current systems represented on the SIT are:

The table provides a good overview of the activities and operational efforts that are going on in the COSS community system, by specifying the following categories:

Publication

The regional and coastal ocean, as a complex interface area where land, hydrology, atmosphere, and ocean interact, concentrates a wide range of actors dealing with increasing socioeconomic and environmental issues. Forecasting the coastal ocean remains a key challenge, also in view of climate change impacts.

A list of all OceanPredict related publications can be found here (to search for the papers below enter “Topical collection”)

COSS-TT Topical Collection – part II

(published May 2021)

The International Coastal Ocean and Shelf Seas Task Team (COSS-TT) community within the OceanPredict program (https://oceanpredict.org/ former GODAE OceanView) fosters multidisciplinary research efforts dedicated to the coastal ocean from the land/ocean interface to the shelf/open ocean exchange regions, in support of regional and coastal ocean forecasting. Following the first topical collection (De Mey et al. 2017), this second one offers research conducted within the COSS-TT themes.

The 2nd COSS-TT Topical Collection has been published in Ocean Dynamics

The papers published in the 2nd COSS-TT Topical Collection are listed below:

• Coastal Ocean Forecasting Science supported by GODAE OceanView Coastal Oceans and Shelf Seas Task Team (COSS-TT)—Part II, Mauro Cirano, Guillaume Charria, Pierre De Mey-Frémaux…
• Multi-platform model assessment in the Western Mediterranean Sea: impact of downscaling on the surface circulation and mesoscale activity, Eva Aguiar, Baptiste Mourre, Mélanie Juza, Emma Reyes
• High-resolution modelling of a coastal harbour in the presence of strong tides and significant river runoff, Jean-Philippe Paquin, Youyu Lu, Stephanne Taylor, Hauke Blanken…
• Structure and dynamics of undercurrents in the western boundary current of the Bay of Bengal, Pavanathara Augustine Francis, Abraham Kaduvathazham Jithin…
• Interactions between barotropic tides and mesoscale processes in deep ocean and shelf regions, Emil Vassilev Stanev, Marcel Ricker
• Development of a 2-km resolution ocean model covering the coastal seas around Japan for operational application, Kei Sakamoto, Hiroyuki Tsujino, Hideyuki Nakano, Shogo Urakawa…
• Observations of near-inertial oscillations along the Brazilian continental shelf break, Pedro Paulo de Freitas, Felipe de Luca Lopes Amorim…
• Temperature assimilation into a coastal ocean-biogeochemical model: assessment of weakly and strongly coupled data assimilation, Michael Goodliff, Thorger Bruening, Fabian Schwichtenberg, Xin Li…
• Realistic modelling of shelf-estuary regions, Martinho Marta-Almeida, Guilherme C. Lessa, Alessandro L. Aguiar
• Development of a new operational system for monitoring and forecasting coastal and open-ocean states around Japan, Nariaki Hirose, Norihisa Usui, Kei Sakamoto, Hiroyuki Tsujino…

TT quad-charts

The task team quad-chart provides a quick glance at the TT’s activities, achievements and future plans.

Coastal- and Shelf Seas Task Team (COSS-TT) – May 2021