The Shetland Model

The Shetland model is an implementation of the Finite Volume Community Ocean Model (FVCOM) and has a domain covering the northern isles of Shetland and Orkney, although Orkney is nowhere near as well resolved as Shetland. The outer boundary extends from approximately 5° W to 0.7° E, and 58.2° to 61.7° N. The model grid is unstructured with the highest horizontal resolution around Shetland, where the node spacing goes down to approximately 30 m. The node spacing is consistently around 30 m along the Shetland coastline rising to around 100 m in St Magnus Bay and to approximately 1 km around the 100 m contour. Away from Shetland towards the open boundary, the grid matches that of the wider Scottish Shelf Model. The water column is resolved using a hybrid sigma layer scheme with 10 standard terrain following sigma layers, each representing 10 % of the water column.

The model is still under development and there are currently no long model hindcast or climatological model runs available.