Dr. Michal Kopera was recently awarded $259,248 in the Office of Naval Research funding to collaborate on a prototype of a new ocean model for the U.S. Navy. Kopera will work on this project with Allan Wallcraft, Eric Chassignet, and Alexandra Bozec at the Florida State University’s Center for Ocean-Atmospheric Prediction Studies and Frank Giraldo at the Naval Postgraduate School. The project will also involve Chithkala Dhulipati, an undergraduate research assistant at Boise State’s Math Department. The prototype will build on Kopera’s current project NUMO, which aims to build an ocean model capable of high-fidelity simulations of glacier/ocean interaction in Greenland fjords. The researchers will evaluate how effective the mathematical and computational methods used in NUMO will be for a global ocean model. If the prototype is successful, it could be turned into an operational model used for Navy operations.
“The prototype will use high-order Galerkin methods, already used in the Navy’s next-generation weather prediction system NEPTUNE, on which I have worked during my postdoc at the Naval Postgraduate School. It will also base on the tools I have developed for the Non-hydrostatic Uniform Model of the Ocean NUMO, which I have been working on for the past four years.” -Michael Kopera