Nonhydrostatic Hindcasts of High Amplitude Internal Waves in the Mid-Atlantic Bight

From late July to early September 2006 an intense field program, Shallow Water 2006 (SW06), was conducted in the Mid-Atlantic Bight (MAB) off of the New Jersey coast. The goal of the program is to the determine the environmental processes that affect shallow water acoustic propagation and scattering and to understand the dynamics of the generation and evolution of those processes. A phenomena that dominates much of the hydrodynamics in the coastal ocean are the internal waves. The waves interact with each other, with the topography and with the ambient currents and stratification to form a complex field of baroclinic internal waves of varying frequencies and wavelengths. Many of these waves are nonlinear and have very high amplitudes (exceeding 50 m) hence large energy. The generation, interactions and transformations of these waves is studied with a very high resolution, nonhydrostatic (NRL-MIT) model system of the ocean hydrodynamics. This model is imbedded in a nested hydrodynamic nowcast/forecast system comprised of the global Navy Coastal Ocean Model (NCOM) and a series of higher resolution NCOM domains.