Numerical Modeling of the Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama Coastal System (LMACS)

Through the support of NOAA’s National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) Restoration Center, the Water Institute of the Gulf ("the Institute”) developed and piloted strategies to increase awareness of, and collaboration across, ongoing numerical modeling efforts to enable more effective application of models to inform coastal resources management and restoration decisions. The Institute’s effort focused on models that resolve the hydrodynamics and water quality of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama coastal systems (LMACS), including the basins of Mississippi Sound and Pontchartrain-Breton Sound (Figure 1), and on tools to predict habitat suitability or distribution of associated species (Gulf sturgeon, oysters, etc.). To complement this effort, the Institute built a list of existing numerical models for the LMACS region that can be leveraged in coastal resource management (provided in a separate file, LMACS Hydro WQ Model Inventory).