Development and verification of the coupled atmosphere-ocean model for Ise Bay, Japan

A coupled atmosphere-ocean model is developed with a final aim of hindcasting and forecasting marine environments of a semi-enclosed sea. In this paper, an outline of the coupled model and its application to the simulation of ocean fields in Ise Bay are described, followed by the model verification using in-situ observations. The accuracy of the coupled model is, moreover, compared with that of a non-coupled ocean model. The verification shows that the coupled model can reproduce well the general tendencies of ocean field changes, although large errors can be found regarding some parameters and layers. It is also shown that as a whole the accuracy of the coupled model is at least not worse than that of the non-coupled ocean model.