Modeling the Coastal Ocean over a Time Period of Several Weeks

This paper is part of a work program concerning the modeling of object drift in near coastal ocean waters over a several week time period. The final target of this program is to develop methods to forecast the drift of things like containers, lost objects or oil spill over long periods of time in near coastal ocean areas. Such methods would be of interest for services in charge of maritime safety, environmental studies or pollution impact assessment. To reach this target, several research topics need to be further investigated. For instance, improvements are needed in the field of the numerical methods to simulate long term drift, in the modeling and simulation of the near coastal ocean waters, in the understanding of ocean-object and ocean-spill interactions and, of course, in the integration of all those aspects to move toward a coherent theory.