Dept of Commerce / NOAA / OAR / PMEL

TMAP: A Brief Introduction

TMAP (the Thermal Modeling and Analysis Project at NOAA's Pacific Marine Environmental laboratory) was formed in 1985 to accomplish two goals:

To develop a computing and data management and data analysis environment that would support use of complex large scale ocean circulation models to study ocean climate processes and to develop strategies for improving the effectiveness of ocean observing systems.
to use these capabilities first in the study of the interannual variations of the tropical ocean-atmosphere system (e.g., the El Nino-Southern Oscillation phenomenon).

The first goal is being met with the development of the FERRET data analysis system.

Work toward the second goal has focussed on:

Process studies and hindcasts of the tropical Pacific ocean using a version of the primitive equation, finite difference ocean circulation model developed at NOAA's Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory.
Studies of ocean surface meteorological variability, using in situ observations and operational meteorological analyses and satellite observations.
TMAP carries out many numerical experiments to try to better understand ocean-atmosphere interactions. In particular we have modeled the 1982-1983 ENSO event, and prepared several animations of those model results.

The group's work has resulted in a number of publications.