High Resolution Numerical Modelling of the Atmosphere and Ocean

Beschreibung

All numerical simulations of atmospheric and oceanic phenomena are limited by the finite spatial resolution, generally requiring a parameterization of effects of motions on unresolved scales on those explicitly resolved. A goal of numerical modelers has been to resolve as many scales of the actual circulation as practically possible.

With the recent advent of a new generation of high-performance computing systems such as the Earth Simulator, some notable thresholds in terms of model resolution have been approached or, in some cases, surpassed. For example, recently the first long integrations with genuinely eddy-permitting global ocean models have been reported. In atmospheric studies, decadal integrations with global models with effective horizontal resolution of about 20 km have now become possible, and shorter integrations of global models that explicitly resolve scales approaching those of individual convective elements have now been reported. These developments in global models have been paralleled by efforts to apply increasingly fine resolution regional atmospheric models for both climate and short-range forecasting problems.

High Resolution Numerical Modelling of the Atmosphere and Ocean includes 15 individual papers that highlight the emerging research in atmospheric and oceanic science that has been made possible by exploiting newly available computational resources. Results from regional atmospheric, global atmospheric, global ocean, and global coupled ocean-atmosphere models are discussed in the various contributions. 

Wataru Ohfuchi is Senior Scientist and Leader of the Atmosphere and Ocean Simulation Research Group at the Earth Simulator Center of the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology.

Kevin Hamilton is Professor of Meteorology and Leader of the Environmental Change Research Team at the International Pacific Research Center of the University of Hawaii Manoa.

Many key issues in dynamical meteorology and physical oceanography depend on interactions among diverse spatial scales. Atmospheric examples are the role of small-scale gravity waves in the zonal-mean momentum balance in the middle atmosphere, the role of tropical cyclones in the large scale energy and momentum balances of the troposphere, or even the direction of spectral cascades of variance in the mesoscale. In the ocean issues of this type include: understanding the detailed physics of the very narrow boundary currents that occur along many coastlines, and the role of mesoscale eddies in determining the strength of the large-scale circulations and meridional ocean heat transports.

Truly comprehensive observational diagnostic studies of these issues are essentially impossible, since they would require the global observational overage at extremely high spatial resolution. An alternative is to study such issues in high resolution models that may span 3 or more orders of magnitude in terms of spatial scales.

There has been a great deal of progress recently on development and application of such fine resolution models. This had been spurred in part by the recent availability of exceptionally powerful computers. Noteworthy in this respect is the Earth Simulator in Yokohama, Japan, which commenced operations in 2002 and provides a peak performance of 40 Terraflops, but competitive supercomputers for scientific applications are now becoming available in the USA and Europe as well. There has developed in the last few years an increased understanding of the scientific value of results from very high resolution comprehensive numerical simulations.

This book documents the first international meeting focused specifically on high-resolution atmospheric and oceanic modeling held at the Earth Simulator Center. Rather than producing a standard conference proceedings it includes papers written by invited speakers at the meeting reporting on their most exciting recent results involving high resolution modeling.

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Kevin Hamilton

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