Slide 4 of 5
Notes:
Focus has been placed on the coastal ocean because so much of our interaction with the
oceans takes place within a 100 km of the shoreline.
Fisheries, recreation, oil and gas exploration, transportation all occur here. Military
initiatives are increasingly conducted in the coastal ocean. Weather along the coastline is
strongly influenced by ocean conditions within 100 km of shore, and by the
interaction of storms with the land-sea interface.
Despite these obvious requirements to understand and predict coastal ocean conditions, it is
very difficult to do so accurately. The complexity of the air-land-sea interface means you
must measure properties—such as currents, temperatures, and light absorption—over
very short distances.
ICON addresses these issues by attempting to combine a number of new measurement
techniques with a numerical model of the coastal ocean. Similar models exist for the
atmosphere for which much more data is available, but ocean models have waited for new
technologies to provide sufficient real-time data sources.
