Petascale climate modeling heats up

Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science News: The development of powerful supercomputers capable of analyzing decades of data in the blink of an eye mark a technological milestone capable of bringing comprehensive changes to science, medicine, engineering, and business worldwide. Researchers at the University of Miami’s Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science, collaborating with NCAR (National Center for Atmospheric Research), COLA (Center for Ocean-Land-Atmospheric Studies) and the University of California at Berkeley are utilizing a $1.4M award from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to generate new “petascale” computer models depicting detailed climate dynamics, and building the foundation for the next generation of complex climate models.

…For decades researchers assumed that, in some sense, weather and climate were independent. In other words, the large-scale climate determined the environment in which weather events formed, but weather had no impact on climate. However, investigators are finding evidence that weather has a profound impact on climate; a finding that is of paramount importance in the drive to improve weather and climate predictions, as well as climate change projections.

With this boost in computing capabilities, the research team led by Dr. Ben Kirtman, professor of meteorology and physical oceanography at the University of Miami, has developed a novel weather and climate modeling strategy, or “interactive ensembles,” specifically designed to isolate interactions between weather and climate.

…“This marks the first time we will have sufficient computational resources available to begin addressing these pressing scientific challenges in a comprehensive manner. The information we collect from this project will serve as a cornerstone for petascale computing in our field, and help to advance the study of the interactions between weather and climate phenomena on a global scale,” said Kirtman. …