TY - GEN
T1 - Parallelization of a subgrid orographic precipitation scheme in an MM5-based regional climate model
AU - Leung, L. Ruby
AU - Michalakes, John G.
AU - Bian, Xindi
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2001.
PY - 2001
Y1 - 2001
N2 - Regional Climate Models (RCMs) are practical downscaling tools to yield regional climate information for assessing the impacts of climate variability and change. The Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) RCM, based on the Penn State/NCAR Mesoscale Model (MM5), features a novel subgrid treatment of orographic precipitation for coupling climate, hydrologic, and ecologic processes at the watershed scale. The parameterization aggregates subgrid variations of surface topography into a finite number of surface elevation bands. An airflow model and a thermodynamic model are used to parameterize the oro-graphic uplift/descent as air parcels cross over mountain barriers or valleys. The parameterization has significant performance advantages over nesting to achieve comparable resolution of climate information; however, previous implementations of the subgrid scheme required significant modification to the host MM5 model, prohibiting its incorporation within the NCAR-supported community version of MM5. With this effort, software engineering challenges have been addressed to incorporate, parallelize, and load-balance the PNNL subgrid scheme with minimum changes to MM5. The result is an efficient, maintainable tool for regional climate simulation and a step forward in the development of an MM5-based community regional climate model.
AB - Regional Climate Models (RCMs) are practical downscaling tools to yield regional climate information for assessing the impacts of climate variability and change. The Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) RCM, based on the Penn State/NCAR Mesoscale Model (MM5), features a novel subgrid treatment of orographic precipitation for coupling climate, hydrologic, and ecologic processes at the watershed scale. The parameterization aggregates subgrid variations of surface topography into a finite number of surface elevation bands. An airflow model and a thermodynamic model are used to parameterize the oro-graphic uplift/descent as air parcels cross over mountain barriers or valleys. The parameterization has significant performance advantages over nesting to achieve comparable resolution of climate information; however, previous implementations of the subgrid scheme required significant modification to the host MM5 model, prohibiting its incorporation within the NCAR-supported community version of MM5. With this effort, software engineering challenges have been addressed to incorporate, parallelize, and load-balance the PNNL subgrid scheme with minimum changes to MM5. The result is an efficient, maintainable tool for regional climate simulation and a step forward in the development of an MM5-based community regional climate model.
UR - https://www.scopus.com/pages/publications/84949656843
U2 - 10.1007/3-540-45545-0_28
DO - 10.1007/3-540-45545-0_28
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:84949656843
SN - 3540422323
SN - 9783540422327
T3 - Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
SP - 195
EP - 203
BT - Computational Science - ICCS 2001 - International Conference, 2001, Proceedings
A2 - Alexandrov, Vassil N.
A2 - Dongarra, Jack J.
A2 - Juliano, Benjoe A.
A2 - Renner, René S.
A2 - Kenneth Tan, C.J.
PB - Springer Verlag
T2 - International Conference on Computational Science, ICCS 2001
Y2 - 28 May 2001 through 30 May 2001
ER -