NOAA’s Coastal Ocean Reanalysis: Gulf of Mexico, Atlantic, and Caribbean

To bridge gaps in service and more equitably serve the Nation’s coastal communities, NOAA’s Coastal Ocean Reanalysis (CORA) couples long-term water level observations with hydrodynamic modeling to create historical information between tide stations. CORA water levels are simulated with ADvanced CIRCulation (ADCIRC) for ocean circulation modeling and coupled with a phase-averaging model called Simulating WAves Nearshore (SWAN) to produce surface gravity wave spectra and account for time-averaged wave contributions. Coastal water level observations from NOAA’s NWLON are low-pass filtered and assimilated into the model to account for long-term sea level variability and to reduce model errors. The domain of this reanalysis spans the Gulf of Mexico, Atlantic (East), and Caribbean coastlines (or CORA-GEC).