There are two models, a Navy model and the NOAA RTOFS model, and they'll give slightly different answers, which is good, so CG will get a sense of the uncertainties in the model forecasts. I suppose the people at Coast Guard believe the models are reliable, and probably no one has told them that the models can get less reliable every day that the government is shut down. The ocean circulation part of the model relies on assimilating data from active radar satellites that measure ocean surface wind speed, wave height, and "Dynamic topography", which is the ocean equivalent of what high and low pressure systems are in the atmosphere. If the ocean model doesn't get these data, its prediction of currents gradually 'relaxes' away from a good approximation of the truth and toward an overall background state that is a climatological average.
Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/AtlanticPoliticsChannel/~3/LzYmbvoMl7w/story01.htm
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