Modelng and Predicting Climate Change.pptVIP

Modeling and Predicting Climate Change Michael Wehner Scientific Computing Group NERSC November 12, 2002 Computational demands Historically, climate models have been limited by computer speed. 1990 AMIP1: Many modeling groups required a calendar year to complete a 10 year integration of a stand alone atmospheric general circulation model. Typical grid resolution was T21 (64X32x10) 2002 CCSM2: A fully coupled atmosphere-ocean-sea ice model achieves 5 simulated years per actual day. Typical global change simulation is 1 or 2 centuries. Control simulations are 10 centuries. Atmosphere is T42 (128X64x26) Ocean is ~1o (384X320x40) Current resolution is not enough Atmosphere Regional climate change prediction will require horizontal grid resolution of 10km (3600X1800) Cloud physics parameterizations could exploit 100 vertical layers Ocean Mesoscale (~50km) eddies are thought to be crucial to ocean heat transport 0.1o grid will resolve these eddies (3600X180) Short stand-alone integrations are underway now. Ensembles of integrations are required to address issues of internal (chaotic) variability. Current practice is to make 4 realizations. 10 is better. Simulated precipitation as a function of resolution Is this realistic? Models of atmospheric and ocean dynamics are subject to time step stability restrictions determined by the horizontal grid resolution. Adds further computational demands as resolution increases Century scale integrations will require of order 500Tflops (sustained). Current production speed is not more than 10Gflops in the US. What is in a climate model? Atmospheric general circulation model Dynamics Sub-grid scale parameterized physics processes Turbulence, solar/infrared radiation transport, clouds. Oceanic general circulation model Dynamics (mostly) Sea ice model Viscous elastic plastic dynamics Thermodynamics Land Model Energy and moisture budgets Biology Chemistry Tracer advection, possibly stiff rate equations. Q.Why are climate models so comp