Global 32-4 km variable-resolution mesh for the MPAS-Atmosphere model

This mesh was created by a collaboration between the Department of Energy’s Water Cycle and Climate Extremes Modeling (WACCEM) project and the

Mesoscale and Microscale Meteorology (MMM) Laboratory at the National Science Foundation National Center for Atmospheric Research (NSF/NCAR).

The mesh contains 1,830,914 horizontal grid cells. The circular refinement region has a radius of approximately 20 degrees. The 4-32km grid-spacing range aims to achieve convection-permitting resolution in the high-resolution domain and resolution sufficient for the jet stream and mid-latitude wave activities (Lu et al., 2015) in the low-resolution domain.

The netcdf file "x8.1830914.grid.nc" includes the variables defining the global unstructured grid for the MPAS model as described in the MPAS Mesh Specification. Following the other MPAS mesh data, we provide graph.info.part.* files necessary for the Message Passing Interface (MPI) parallelism. For example, a simulation using 1024 MPI ranks will use graph.info.part.1024. For the number of MPI tasks not provided in this dataset, a user needs to create a new partitioning file using the METIS tool and the graph.info file as described in the MPAS user guide (available here).

This data will also be available from the MPAS mesh website.

The mesh generation is supported by the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science Biological and Environmental Research (BER) as part of the Regional and Global Model Analysis Program Area. We acknowledge the use of computational resources of the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC). The Pacific Northwest National Laboratory is operated for the Department of Energy by Battelle Memorial Institute under contract DE-AC05-76RL01830.