The St Magnus Bay Model

The St. Magnus Bay (SMB) model is an implementation of the Finite Volume Community Ocean Model (FVCOM) and has a domain focused on St. Magnus Bay on the west coast of Shetland. The model grid is unstructured with the highest horizontal resolution as small as 15 – 20 m between nodes in Row Sound between the Shetland mainland and the island of Muckle Roe. More typically the node spacing is 50 – 100 m in the Sounds and Voes of this region. The outer open boundary has a node spacing of around 1.2 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 SMB 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 SMB climatology. The latest version of the climatology is SMB 1.02.

This information page is part of the theme: 
The model domain and node spacing of the St Magnus Bay model