Atmospheric Climate Model with Adaptive Grid and Physics

Development of an Atmospheric Climate Model with Adaptive Grid and Physics

J. Penner M. Herzog C. Jablonowski B. van Leer R. Oehmke Q.F. Stout K.G. Powell
University of Michigan

Abstract: An adaptive grid dynamical core for a global atmospheric climate model has been developed. Adaptations allow a smooth transition from hydrostatic to non-hydrostatic physics at small resolution. The adaptations use a parallel program library for block-wise adaptive grids on the sphere. This library also supports the use of a reduced grid with coarser resolution in the longitudinal direction as the poles are approached. This permits the use of a longer time step since the CFL number restriction (CFL < 1) in a regular longitude-latitude grid is most severe in the zonal direction at high latitudes. Several tests show that our modelling procedures are stable and accurate.

Keywords: advection, atmospheric modeling, sperical adaptive grid, adaptive block, parallel computing, adaptive mesh refinement

Complete paper. This paper appears in J. Physics Conf. Series 16, pp.353--357. doi:10.1088/1742-6596/16/1/049

Related work

My work in modeling climate, atmospheric, and space systems: papers and an overview of research.
My work in parallel computing: papers, and an overview of research.
General parallel computing: an explanation of parallel computing, a tutorial, Parallel Computing 101, and a list of resources