  Predicting the temporal and spatial dynamics of seafloor roughness is
important for understanding bottom boundary layer hydrodynamics. The Navy
Seafloor Evolution Architecture (NSEA) is a platform for modeling the dynamic
nature of the seafloor by combining hydrodynamic forcing information and
observations from diverse sources. NSEA's three modules include a specification
of hydrodynamic forcing, a seafloor evolution model, and a model to generate
roughness realizations. It can be run in forward mode to predict seafloor
roughness including the uncertainty from forcing information, or in inverse
mode to estimate parameters from observed seafloor roughness. The model is
demonstrated and shown to have good agreement with a field dataset of observed
seafloor roughness. Similarly running in inverse mode, NSEA was demonstrated to
predict the observed mean sediment grain size with good agreement. NSEA's
modularity allows for a wide range of applications in hydrodynamic and acoustic
modeling, and is built within an expandable framework that lends for coupling
to such models with minimal effort.
