Malta Shelf Forecasting System
Physical Oceanography Unit University of Malta

Funded by European Commission
Framework Program
Energy, Environment and Sustainable Development
Malta Shelf Hydrodynamical Model - ROSARIO
ROSARIO Malta Shelf Bulletin Overview

The operational shelf scale forecasting system for the Malta Shelf Area runs in slave mode, through the daily re-initialization from the Sicily Channel Regional Model (SCRM) daily averaged forecast fields at day J (corresponding to Day 0 of the Malta shelf model) and the forcing at the lateral boundaries by SCRM fields in the subsequent days. The SCRM has a spatial resolution of 1/32° while the ROSARIO forecast is provided at two resolutions, 1/64° and 1/96° respectively. The Malta model run starts at 12:00 UTC of day 0 (the day prior to the release of the forecast) and provides 4 days of 3 hour averaged forecast fields centred at 1.5hr, 4.5hr, 7.5hr, 10.5hr, 13.5hr, 16.5hr, 19.5hr, 22.5hr of each day.

The Malta shelf model is forced at the surface by hourly high resolution forecast fields from the Skiron atmospheric model, running operationally on a daily basis and released by the University of Athens.

The Variational Initialization technique, developed during the MFSPP project is used to lower the inertia-gravity oscillations in the model integration, which contaminate the spin up of the short-range forecast run.  

 
Schematic Timeline of the Malta Shelf ROSARIO II forecasting system.

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