Data-Driven Regional Ocean Models Key for Red Sea Insights

KAUST researchers, led by Prof. Ibrahim Hoteit, have developed the first high-resolution historical reconstruction of the Red Sea’s circulation. By integrating fine-grained regional data with a specialized ocean model, the study reveals new characteristics of ocean currents, temperature, salinity, and seasonal trends that global models fail to capture.

Global ocean datasets, often used by scientists and industry, rely on coarse grids and cannot accurately depict regional oceanic dynamics. The Red Sea, in particular, suffers from limited long-term data, making precise modeling a challenge. To address this, the KAUST team combined satellite and in situ data, refined model parameters, and leveraged the Shaheen supercomputer to conduct large-scale simulations.

This approach successfully resolved key regional ocean behaviors, including a three-layer transport current in the Bab-al-Mandab Strait that global models oversimplify. The findings underscore the importance of regional datasets for planning, particularly for large-scale developments in Saudi Arabia.

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Reference

1. Sanikommu, S., Langodan, S., Dasari, H. P., Zhan, P., Krokos, G., Abualnaja, Y. O., Asfahani, K. & Hoteit, I.  Making the case for high-resolution regional ocean reanalyses: An example with the Red Sea. Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society 104, E1241–E1264 (2023).| article