Ocean Nowcast/Forecast Systems for Improvement of Naval Undersea Capabilities

The U.S. Navy is a major investor in ocean model development. The pay-off of such an investment is the value-added ocean nowcast/forecast systems on naval operations and warfare effectiveness. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the value added of the Navy's nowcast/forecast system to naval antisubmarine warfare (ASW) and anti-surface warfare (ASUW). The nowcast/forecast versus observational fields were used by the Weapon Acoustic Preset Program (WAPP) to determine the suggested presets for Mk 48 variant torpedo. The metric used to compare the two sets of outputs is the relative difference in acoustic coverage area generated by WAPP. Output presets are created for five different scenarios, two ASUW scenarios and three ASW scenarios in the South China Sea. The same metrics used in the nowcast/forecast case were used to generate and compare the acoustic coverage. Analysis of the output reveals that the ocean forecast system outperformed the nowcast system in most scenarios.