Investigation of Eastern Caribbean Sea Forecasting Models in Support of Climate Change Mitigation and Maritime Disaster Management

Island countries of the eastern Caribbean Sea are vulnerable to storm surge, and coastal flooding/erosion.Existing and forthcoming consequences of climate change would also have severe impact upon these islandstates. These island countries have few options other than to continue preparing for and mitigating the effectsof climate change. Key to this strategy is infrastructure that monitors the Caribbean Sea and its coastal zones,and environmental models that forecast the behaviour of the sea to mitigate the risk in support of climatechange mitigation and maritime disaster management. OEA Technologies Incorporated, which is a marineenvironmental monitoring company with offices in Halifax, Nova Scotia, recently secured its first marinemonitoring consulting contract in the Caribbean. In 2013, OEA intends to expand its international services toinclude ocean forecasting, but requires technical analyses of applicable models and forecasting systems, and aviable regional model, prior to implementation of this strategic initiative. The purpose of this Engage Grantproject is to utilize marine environmental forecasting expertise within Dalhousie University to: (i) identifyocean forecasting models that may forecast coastal effects of climate change, tropical storms and hurricanes inthe Eastern Caribbean Sea; (ii) with an initial emphasis on sea level rise and storm surge, develop afine-resolution (i.e. regional) storm surge model for the Eastern Caribbean Sea, which is nested inside thelarge-scale storm surge model for the eastern area of the North Atlantic Ocean developed by Dr. Jinyu Sheng atDalhousie University. Creation of this nested-grid model will require Dr. Sheng to research temporal andspatial scales that provide practical forecasting results, and the ocean monitoring data required to initialize,constrain and operate the model for such purpose; and (iii) define required modelling infrastructure.