Coastal oceans and semi-enclosed seas are marked by extremely high spatial and temporal variability that challenge the existing predictive capabilities of numerical simulations. The POM is a time dependent, primitive equation circulation model on a three dimensional grid that includes realistic topography and a free surface (Blumberg and Mellor, 1987). River outflow is also not included. However, the seasonal variation in sea surface height, temperature, salinity, circulation and transport are well represented by the model. From a series of numerical experiments, the qualitative and quantitative effects of non-linearity, wind forcing and lateral boundary transport on the JES are analyzed, yielding considerable insight into the external factors affecting the region oceanography. The model results were sampled every thirty days.
The model contains 94
100 15 horizontally fixed grid points.
The horizontal spacing is 10' latitude and longitude (approximately 11.54 to
15.18 km in the zonal direction and 18.53 km in the latitudinal direction) and
15 vertical sigma coordinate levels are used. The model domain is from
35.0
N to 51.5 N, and from 127.0 E to
142.5 E. The bottom topography is the smoothed data from the Naval
Oceanographic Office Digital Bathymetry Data Base 5 minute by 5 minute
resolution (DBDB5). The horizontal diffusivities are modeled using the
Smagorinsky (1963) form with the coefficient chosen to be 0.2 for this
application. The bottom stress 
is assumed to follow a quadratic law
where 
(= 1025 kg/m
) is the characteristic density of the sea
water, V
is the horizontal component of the bottom velocity,
and 
is the drag coefficient which was determined by the similarity theory.