Impacts

Atmospheric Dynamical Core Colloquium

Curator partnered with the DOE-funded Earth System Grid (ESG) project and its NSF-sponsored affiliate, the Science Gateway Framework (SGF), to develop a prototype Gateway for the 2008 NCAR Advanced Study Program Colloquium entitled Numerical Techniques for Global Atmospheric Models. Over two weeks, about 80 Colloquium participants ran 9 atmospheric dynamical cores - the portion of an atmospheric model that solves the fluid equations - in specified test configurations, and compared their outputs. Workshop organizers and technical collaborators extended the ESG ontology with additional metadata describing each dynamical core in detail. They used the extended ontology to create an on-line environment in which the hundreds of collected datasets could be analyzed collaboratively. Capabilities included tools and user interfaces for faceted search and browse (from ESG); plus links from datasets to exhaustive descriptions of the components that generated them and dynamic comparison tables (developed by Curator). The Dynamical Core Gateway hosts all of the metadata and data from that colloquium in which 9 dynamical core modeling groups ran 22 test cases at 5 different resolutions.

Output of nine models running test case 5-0-0 (Mountain-induced Rossby wave): 700 hPa zonal wind at day 15. The test starts with balanced and isothermal initial conditions. A 2-km-high Gaussian-hill-shaped mountain is placed at [90degE, 30degN] (not shown) to trigger Rossby waves. The test evaluates the treatment of the orography and reveals numerical noise (especially at later days). [From CISL Supports NCAR ASP Colloquium]