DOE/BER SciDAC Science Application: Modeling the Earth System

M. Taylor, J. Drake, P. Jones

Goals:

Model full carbon cycle: prescribe C02 emissions instead of concentrations
Ensure CCSM is ready to fully utilize upcoming petascale resources

Model Components of the Community Climate System Model (CCSM)

For current and planned formulations of the CCSM, the Atmospheric dynamical core (dycore) will be the parallel bottleneck

Current operational dycores use Latitude-Longitude Grids: Well tested numerical methods, many good solutions to the “pole problem”, except these solutions all degrade parallel scalability

Petascale performance requires moving to quasi-uniform unstructured grids:

Current SNL Focus: Integration and evaluation of cubed-sphere dycores into the CCSM.

Initial dycore: Spectral Elements
- We developed a new locally conservative version based on compatibility (as opposed to flulx based local conservation)
- Motivated by DOE ASCR funded work on compatible differencing
- This will be the first dycore in CCSM to locally conserve both mass and energy
Future dycores to be integrated and evaluated:
- GFDL Finite Volumes on the cubed-sphere
- NCAR Discontinuous Galerkin

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