CCM3 T170 Cloud and Precipitation Simulation

The NCAR Community Climate Model (CCM3) is a state of the art atmospheric
general circulation model designed for climate research on high-speed
supercomputers and select upper-end workstations. This cloud and precipitation
simulation covers an entire year.Introduction Today's generation of climate
models are typically run at T42 resolution, which translates to about a 3
degrees latitude-longitude finite difference grid at the equator. At this
resolution, major geographical regions are entirely unaccounted for by the
models. For example, the California Sierras slope linearly up to the Rockies,
leaving out the Great Basin completely. With support from the DOE CCPP program
and the Central Research Institute of Electric Power Industry (CRIEPI) in
Tokyo, an experimental version of the NCAR CCM3 model was run at T170
resolution (512x256 gridpoints) where the solution was sampled hourly for an
entire year. This is comparable to examining the solution as would be done in a
global weather model.

This simulation was conducted in connection with a collaborative scientific
investigation of high-resolution global climate modeling. This project involved
scientists and software engineers at both the National Center for Atmospheric
Research and at the Central Research Institute of Electric Power Industry
(CRIEPI) in Japan. Portions of the simulations required to produce this
animation were conducted on a 128-processor SGI Origin 2000 computer system
located at Los Alamos National Laboratory, and on an 8-processor NEC SX4
computer system in Tokyo. Because of the large computational demands, global
climate models are typically run at a horizontal resolution that is four times
courser than for the present study. The simulation used for the current
animation nominally resolves features as small as 75 kilometers and is about 60
times more expensive than a typical climate model because of the increase in
horizontal resolution.