The East Coast of Lewis and Harris Model

The East Coast of Lewis and Harris (ECLH) model is an implementation of the Finite Volume Community Ocean Model (FVCOM) and has a domain covering the whole of the Outer Hebrides, Skye and the Small Isles, and the north-west coast of Scotland. The model grid is unstructured with the highest horizontal resolution along most of the east coast of Lewis, where the  node spacing is as small as 40 m but more typically 100 – 200 m. In the east of the domain, the north-west coast of Scotland, the node spacing is typically around 500 m. At the open boundary, the node spacing is approximately 3 km. The water column is resolved by 10 terrain following sigma layers, each representing 10 % of the water column.

The main output from the model to date is a one year Climatology representing typical present day conditions (1990-2014). For this climatology, the model was forced by the wider Scottish Shelf Model (SSM) climatology at the open boundary. Effectively, the ECLH model is nested within the wider SSM. Climatological atmospheric forcing and freshwater input were also applied to the model. The wider SSM has a 1993 tidal component included, which was then applied to the ECLH climatology. The latest version of the climatology is ECLH 1.02.

This information page is part of the theme: 
The model domain and node spacing of the East Coast of Lewis and Harris model