Description

High-resolution global climate modeling holds the promise of capturing planetary-scale climate modes and small-scale (regional and sometimes extreme) features simultaneously, including their mutual interaction. This paper discusses a new state-of-the-art high-resolution Community Earth System Model (CESM) simulation that was performed with these goals in mind. The atmospheric component was at 0.25º grid spacing, and ocean component at 0.1º. One hundred years of “present day” simulation were completed. Major results were that annual mean sea surface temperature (SST) in the Equatorial Pacific, and El-Niño Southern Oscillation variability were well simulated compared to standard resolution models. Tropical and Southern Atlantic SST also had much reduced bias compared to previous versions of the model. In addition, the high resolution of the model enabled small-scale features of the climate system to be represented, such as air-sea interaction over ocean frontal zones, mesoscale systems generated by the Rockies, and tropical cyclones. Associated single component runs and standard resolution coupled runs are used to help attribute the strengths and weaknesses of the fully coupled run. The high-resolution run employed 23,404 cores, costing 250 thousand processor-hours per simulated year and made about 2 simulated years per day on the NCAR- Wyoming supercomputer ‘Yellowstone’.

Thanks go to Justin Small, Julio Bacmeister, David Bailey, Allison Baker, Stuart Bishop, Frank Bryan, Julie Caron, John Dennis, Peter Gent, Hsiao-ming Hsu, Markus Jochum, David Lawrence, Ernesto Muñoz, Pedro diNezio, Tim Scheitlin, Bob Tomas, Joe Tribbia, Yu-heng Tseng, Mariana Vertenstein, Gary Strand, Teagan King for their contributions to forming the project, creating the dataset, analyzing and interpreting the data, or data retention and archiving.

DOI

https://doi.org/10.26024/cpvm-az43

Authors

Justin Small

Resource Support Contacts

DiscussCESMForums (http://bb.cgd.ucar.edu)
UCAR/NCAR - Climate and Global Dynamics Laboratory
esg-support@earthsystemgrid.org

Related Activities

Project - CCSM

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