High-resolution nested UA-ICON Simulation during the VortEx Campaign

Project: DataWave: Collaborative Gravity Wave Research - DataWave (https://datawaveproject.github.io/) is an international consortium dedicated to improving our understanding and representation of gravity waves. The DataWave project focuses on enhancing our modeling capability for gravity waves and large-scale circulation, particularly to lead to novel observationally constrained and data-driven gravity wave parameterization schemes.
This project is supported by Schmidt Sciences, LLC., as part of the Virtual Earth System Research Institute (VESRI). This work utilized resources from the Deutsches Klimarechenzentrum (DKRZ), granted by its Scientific Steering Committee (WLA) under project IDs bb1371, and bm1233.
Summary: This dataset contains high-resolution nested simulations conducted over Andøya, Norway (ALOMAR) with UA-ICON (ua-icon-2.1) in the context of the NASA Vorticity Experiment (VortEx) sounding rocket campaign in March 2023. UA-ICON was configured with 180 vertical levels, a model top at 150 km, and a global horizontal resolution of R2B7 (~20 km). One-way nesting was applied to achieve progressively finer resolutions of R2B8 (~10 km), R2B9 (~5 km), R2B10 (~2.5 km), and R2B11 (~1.25 km). In the global domain (~20 km resolution), the large-scale dynamics during the campaign were specified by nudging to ECMWF operational analyses up to an altitude of 50 km. At resolutions finer than 5 km, UA-ICON resolves a significant portion of the gravity wave (GW) spectrum. Consequently, GW and convective parameterizations were progressively turned off, starting from domain DOM3 (~5 km), to isolate the effects of resolved GWs. The simulations show satisfactory agreement with observations, highlighting the model’s capabilities for investigating the dynamics in the MLT region.