Progress in Fast, Accurate Multi-scale Climate Simulations

Conference · Thu Jan 01 00:00:00 EST 2015

OSTI ID:1185917

Collins, William D ^[1]; Johansen, Hans ^[1]; Evans, Katherine J ^[2]; Woodward, Carol S. ^[3]; Caldwell, Peter ^[3]

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1. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL)
2. ORNL
3. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL)

We present a survey of physical and computational techniques that have the potential to con- tribute to the next generation of high-fidelity, multi-scale climate simulations. Examples of the climate science problems that can be investigated with more depth include the capture of remote forcings of localized hydrological extreme events, an accurate representation of cloud features over a range of spatial and temporal scales, and parallel, large ensembles of simulations to more effectively explore model sensitivities and uncertainties. Numerical techniques, such as adaptive mesh refinement, implicit time integration, and separate treatment of fast physical time scales are enabling improved accuracy and fidelity in simulation of dynamics and allow more complete representations of climate features at the global scale. At the same time, part- nerships with computer science teams have focused on taking advantage of evolving computer architectures, such as many-core processors and GPUs, so that these approaches which were previously considered prohibitively costly have become both more efficient and scalable. In combination, progress in these three critical areas is poised to transform climate modeling in the coming decades.

• Research Organization: Oak Ridge National Lab. (ORNL), Oak Ridge, TN (United States)
• Sponsoring Organization: USDOE Office of Science (SC)
• DOE Contract Number: DE-AC05-00OR22725
• OSTI ID: 1185917
• Resource Relation: Conference: International Conference on Computational Science, Reykjavik, Iceland, 20150601, 20150603
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

climate modeling
multiscale