Atmospheric Model Dynamical Core Portal
Participants
Julien Chastang/NCAR, Sylvia Murphy/ESMF Core Team, Luca Cinquini/NCAR, Christiane Jablonowski/University of Michigan, Peter Lauritzen/NCAR, Cecelia DeLuca/ESMF Core Team
For questions on this project, please contact curator@list.woc.noaa.gov.
Description
Curator partnered with the DOE-funded Earth System Grid (ESG) project 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), links from datasets to exhaustive descriptions of the components that generated them, and dynamic comparison tables (developed by Curator). A special Dynamical Core Gateway hosted all of the metadata and data from that colloquium in which 9 dynamical core modeling groups ran 22 test cases at 5 different resolutions. This information will be ported to the main ESG gateway in 2011.
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). [Image courtest of Christiane Jablonowski.]
