Disclaimer

Please note that all outputs of the Texas BAYCAST are provided as-is and are intended for research and educational purposes only. These outputs should not be used for any real-time decision making without the additional guidance of local authorities or planning agencies. While TWDB strives to maximize accuracy and reliability with our modeling products, we cannot ensure that the model is exactly correct at any given location or under all possible circumstances and these data products should only be used with those uncertainties in mind. The model is currently only designed to simulate typical conditions and will not provide accurate information during extreme events or storms.

BAYCAST Data Products

All simulation outputs from the Texas BAYCAST are formatted as archival NetCDF files following CF and ACDD metadata and naming conventions. Simulation results are split apart by day (in UTC time), and the temporal coverage of outputs available on this server will continue to expand (both forwards and backwards in time) as new simulations are completed and validated. In order to accommodate a wide variety of users and stakeholders, there are currently six standard data products which are provided for each date, using a standard naming convention as follows:

{product-type}_{dimension_layer}_{year-month-day}.nc

Outputs are currently divided into two product types: hydrodynamic (“hydro”) variables and chemistry (“chem”) variables. Each hydrodynamic file contains physical parameters such as flow velocity, water surface elevation, and bed elevation, whereas each chemistry file contains salinity and water temperature. For each of these product types, users have access to either the full three-dimensional (“3D”) files containing all of the vertical information for each variable, or smaller two-dimensional (“2D”) files containing only one layer of data—either the water surface layer (“surf”) or the depth-averaged values (“depth”). The temporal resolution for all outputs is 2-hours and the timezone for all datasets is UTC. All file types include geographic information on the mesh nodes and connectivity to assist with interpretation—however, only the 3D products contain the original model mesh (with both triangular and orthogonal mesh elements), whereas the 2D products contain a modified version of the mesh in which the orthogonal elements have been bisected into triangles, which makes simple operations like plotting easier in many common scientific computing packages (e.g. matplotlib.pyplot.tripcolor). Likewise, only the 3D products contain information on the vertical mesh or flow velocities in the z-direction. An interactive version of the mesh can be directly viewed on the “Mesh Viewer” page. There are also two “recent” data products which pre-merge the latest 10 days of simulation outputs for use with oil spill trajectory forecasting; these files are overwritten in place each day. All files contain other useful metadata, and users are encouraged to check this information for other relevant details, such as the date the simulation was conducted or the version of the model that was used.

Output files will occasionally be updated to improve accuracy or spatial coverage where possible, particularly for files with dates close to the present day. Significant changes (e.g. the model grid or inflow settings) will be reflected in the model version number contained within the metadata for each file, where higher version numbers correspond to improvements in model performance. Updating the full data series with new settings is a time-consuming process, so it is possible that at any given time the files in this server will not all reflect the same model version. Consistency is a priority, but the first goal for this operational model is to ensure that the best simulation results are accessible at all times. Version updates are infrequent and will typically align with changes in the year—please contact Coastal Science staff for information regarding current version breaks in the data series and the associated changes in the model settings.

Citation

If the model outputs or software are used in a publication, please cite both the following:

Wright, K., Du, J., Park, K., Kiaghadi, A. (2025) TEXAS BAYCAST: The Next-Generation TWDB Operational Forecast Model for the Texas Coast, (Version X.X.X) [Computer Software], Texas Water Development Board, doi:10.5281/zenodo.18039256

Du, J., Park, K., (2024) Development of a Cross-Scale Hydrodynamic Model for All Texas Coastal Waters, Final Report #2300012715 submitted to Texas Water Development Board