Coastal waters and lowlands of the U.S. are threatened by climate change, sea-level rise, flooding, oxygen depleted “dead zones”, oil spills and unforeseen disasters. With funding from the IOOS Program Office, strong and strategic collaborations among experts from academia, federal operational centers and industry are forged to create the U.S. IOOS Coastal and Ocean Modeling Testbed (COMT).

The COMT serves as a conduit between the federal operational and research communities and allows sharing of numerical models, observations and software tools. The COMT supports integration, comparison, scientific analyses and archiving of data and model output needed to elucidate, prioritize, and resolve federal and regional operational coastal ocean issues associated with a range of existing and emerging coastal oceanic, hydrologic, and ecological models. The Testbed has enabled significant community building (within the modeling community as well as enhancing academic and federal operational relations) which has dramatically improved model development.

Projects supported through the COMT are designed to create new knowledge, new model code and tools; develop operational user capacity; and build a repository of evaluation data sets to expand and improve the modeling capabilities of operational partners and the broader coastal and ocean modeling community. Transition from research to operations is enhanced by scoping projects that meet identified operational needs, including both researchers and operational users on project teams, and leveraging transition resources.

For the most up to date information on current projects, please go to comt.ioos.us.

This page includes background information on the testbed, governing documents and some of our summary and overview presentations.