Weather Applications

An important goal of the SIMA project is to provide the capability to run weather configurations in CESM. Weather configurations refer to running the atmosphere model at convection-permitting resolutions, which is made possible through the implementation of the MPAS non-hydrostatic dynamical core in CESM. Further, the atmospheric physics package must be appropriately formulated for the mesoscale, and tools need to be adopted that provide a means to initialize the model from analysis products for short-term integrations. SIMA also aims to couple the convection-permitting atmosphere with CESM's ocean model, configured at mesoscale permitting scales, to provide fully-coupled prediction and hindcast capabilties. Weather configurations therefore require a significant investment in model development, including investing in model infrastructure to address ultra high-resolution performance issues. A selection of this development is described below.

Modifying the CAM physics packages for use at mesoscale resolutions. 

Lead: Bill Skamarock, NCAR

An update on this work was presented at the 2023 Annual CESM Workshop in June. Click here for a link to the presentation.