A high resolution wind&wave forecast model chain for the Mediterranean and Adriatic Sea

DHI (Danish Hydraulic Institute) and HyMOLab (Hydrodynamics and Met-Ocean Laboratory of the Dept. of Engineering and Architecture of the University of Trieste) have undertaken a joint applied research project with the aim to develop a state-of-art wind-wave forecast service at mid resolution for the Mediterranean Sea and at very high resolution for the Adriatic Sea. Weather routing, civil protection, coastal engineering, oil&gas and renewable energy fields, the planning of operations at sea, ... are just few among the multiple potential applications of this service. The meteorological model used in this study is WRF-ARW, one of the most widely used state-of-the-art open-source non-hydrostatic model. Global Forecast System (GFS) dataset provides the boundary and initial conditions. MIKE21-Spectral Waves is used as wave model with resolution ranging from 0.1 to 0.03 approximately. The use of a local area meteorological model guarantees higher levels of resolution and accuracy in an area such as the Mediterranean Sea where the complex orography and coastline induce short-time/small-space weather scales. The model chain runs daily (or twice a day on demand) on the High Performance Computing (HPC) infrastructure of HyMOLab. The validation of the entire model chain and specifically the forecast data obtained for the sea state is continuously updated according to new available data from satellites and buoys. Anyway, a major verification of the performance of the model chain against historic data (hindcast) is almost mandatory. For this aim, we performed a multi-decade test obtaining very good statistical parameters for the entire model chain performance. In this context the hindcast dataset developed by DHI and HyMOLab consists of 35 years of hourly data for the period 1979-2013, with the same model chain. The CFSR d093.0 hourly dataset with a spatial resolution of 0.5 provides the boundary and initial conditions. The atmospheric and wave models performance is checked against six satellite datasets, missions Envisat, ERS-2, Geosat FO, Jason-1, Jason-2, Topex-Poseidon, using a moving window technique procedure. Wave data close to coast are compared with available data from more than 20 buoys. The paper describes the validation procedure adopted for the hindcasted data. Furthermore the forecast service is described too, with specific emphasis to the very high resolution adopted in the Adriatic Sea

A state-of-the-art met-ocean model chain for wind&wave hindcast over the Mediterranean and Black Seas: Implementation, Tuning and Validation Against Field Data

This work is currently being carried out at the Met-Ocean Laboratory (MOLab) of the Dept. of Engineering and Architecture of the University of Trieste [1] and at Danish Hydraulic Institute-Italia (DHI) with the aim to develop and validate a state-of-the-art model chain for medium resolution (0.10\ub0 approximately) wind and wave hindcast simulations over the Mediterranean and Black Seas, consisting of 30 years long hourly data, ready to be used for engineering and environmental applications or even to be used as input for local nested higher resolution simulations (of order of few kilometers or less). The meteorological model used is WRF-ARW [2,3,4], (one of) the most widely used state-of-the-art open-source non-hydrostatic model. The CFSR d093.0 dataset [5,6], hourly data with a spatial resolution of 0.5\ub0, is used as boundary and initial conditions. WWIII [7] and MIKE21 [8] are used as wave models with resolution ranging from 0.1\ub0 to 0.03\ub0 approximately. The paper will show the results of the preliminary validation tests, both wind and wave, carried out over an entire year, comparing the data of several field stations

Excited states behavior of nucleobases in solution: insights from computational studies

We review the most significant results obtained in the study of isolated nucleobases in solution by quantum mechanical methods, trying to highlight also the most relevant open issues. We concisely discuss some methodological issues relevant to the study of molecular electronic excited molecular states in condensed phases, focussing on the methods most commonly applied to the study of nucleobases, i.e. continuum models as the Polarizable Continuum Model and explicit solvation models. We analyse how the solvent changes the relative energy of the lowest energy excited states in the Franck-Condon region, their minima and the Conical Intersections among the different states, interpreting the experimental optical spectra, both steady state and time-resolved. Several methods are available for accurately including solvent effects in the Franck-Condon region, and for most of the nucleobases the solvent shift on the different excited states can be considered assessed. The study of the excited state decay, both radiative and non-radiative, in solution still poses instead significant theoretical challenges