CSOMIO (Consortium for Simulation of Oil-Microbial Interactions in the Ocean)
Contributed offline passive-tracer advection modeling to CSOMIO, a multi-institution consortium simulating oil-microbial interactions in the ocean.
The Challenge
Simulating how oil and microbial communities interact and transport through the ocean requires tracking large numbers of tracer particles, but running full online particle advection alongside every circulation simulation is computationally expensive.
The Approach
Developed and validated an offline passive-tracer advection scheme within ROMS (Regional Ocean Modeling System), allowing tracer transport to be computed after the fact from saved circulation output instead of online during every simulation.
The Result
Published in Geoscientific Model Development (Thyng, Kobashi, Ruiz-Xomchuk, Qu, Chen & Hetland, 2020) — the offline scheme achieved 99.6% skill against online advection at a fraction of the computational cost, developed under the CSOMIO consortium.
Thumbnail: Deepwater Horizon oil spill response, Gulf of Mexico — © Kris Krüg, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.