Marine Scotland has led the development of a hydrodynamic model of Scottish continental shelf waters, the Scottish Shelf Model (SSM). The initial model development was contracted out by the Scottish Government to CH2M Hill who worked on the project in conjunction with the National Oceanography Centre (NOC), Liverpool. The project was completed at the start of 2016. Marine Scotland Science (MSS) is now the custodian of the SSM and is continuing to develop it. The vision is for the model, and the model outputs, to be available to the wider marine science community. The SSM covers the Scottish continental shelf at relatively high resolution (up to 1 km node spacing at the coastline). In addition to the wider SSM, a number of smaller subdomain areas have been developed. The integrated output combines the output from the wider domain with the output from the smaller, higher resolution domains. This for example allows for detailed particle tracking simulations to be conducted across individual model domain boundaries.

Variables include:
Water surface elevation, zeta;
Depth average horizontal velocity fields, ua and va;
Full water column velocity fields, u and v;
Vertical Sigma Coordinate Velocity, omega;
Turbulent Eddy Viscosity For Momentum, km.

The data combines the climatology data (1960-2004)