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The East Coast Community Ocean Forecast System (ECCOFS) is a data assimilating ocean analysis and forecast system being developed by Rutgers University, the University of California Santa Cruz, Fathom Science Inc., and the National Ocean Service (NOS) of NOAA for transition to operations at NCEP in 2028. The ECCOFS domain spans the eastern seaboard of North America and Intra-Americas Seas from the Grand Banks of Newfoundland in the north to the mouth of the Orinoco River, Venezuela, in the south. ECCOFS will complement the existing WCOFS (West Coast Operational Forecast System) to achieve complete forecast coverage of U.S. territorial seas adjacent to the 48 contiguous states and Puerto Rico. Each day ECCOFS generates an ocean analysis using the Regional Ocean Modeling System (ROMS) 4-Dimensional Variational (4D-Var) data assimilation (DA) system constrained by ocean observations from the preceding 3 days. From this ocean state analysis, a new 5-day forecast is launched for ocean currents, salinity and temperature for the full 3-dimensional water column, and sea level. The forecast resolution is 3 km in the horizontal at 50 vertical levels. Observations presently assimilated include satellite sea level and temperature, and in situ temperature and salinity from moorings, drifters, profiling floats, autonomous underwater vehicles, ships of opportunity, and sensors affixed to fishing gear. When fully configured, ECCOFS will also assimilate satellite salinity, surface velocity measured by land-based radars, and temperature data from animal tags. The ECCOFS configuration is being used as a test-bed for several new developments in ROMS 4D-Var capabilities. These include space- and time-average observation operators, Rossby-radius dependent scales in the background error covariance, and mixed resolution DA wherein the so-called inner loop iterations of 4D-Var proceed at lower resolution to reduce analysis run-time. These developments are being mirrored in the ROMS 4D-Var implementation within the Joint Center for Satellite Data Assimilation (JCSDA) Joint Effort for Data Assimilation Integration (JEDI) that promises future enhancements in the representation of background model error covariance, and Earth System Model coupling. In the spirit of open-source, open-science modeling, the ECCOFS group is making openly accessible the model figuration and all inputs files to enable external users to experiment with model options or configure complementary coupled earth system or ecosystem models. Software tools to configure one-way downscaling nested sub-domains for regional applications will also be available. Example provisional outputs from the prototype ECCOFS can be browsed at https://eccofs.fathomscience.com/, and the full resolution model outputs will eventually be accessible via the AWS Open Data Registry and NOAA Open Data Dissemination (NODD) Program in analysis ready cloud optimized format.
