Climate Modeling

In October 1997, just as El Niño was getting ready to soak California with one of the wettest winters ever, nearly 150 climate modeling experts from around the world convened at NERSC to discuss advances in computational weather forecasting and climate modeling. At the meeting, scientists demonstrated that their tools for predicting weather are getting more reliable and extending the range of forecasts. Still, the need for higher-resolution modeling tools was also made clear.

To help meet that need, a joint project between NERSC and the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (GFDL) is developing a massively parallel version of GFDL's Modular Ocean Model code (MOM), which is used by researchers worldwide for climate and ocean modeling.

The parallel MOM will be able to run on the world's fastest computers, enabling large-scale, high-resolution, decade- to century-long ocean simulations.

Efficient use of cache-based processor architectures, significantly improved data input/output, and a more convenient user interface will allow MOM to run on both workstations and massively parallel supercomputers. I/O improvements have already enabled part of the code to run 50 times faster on a parallel machine than on a single processor. And integration of the netCDF library into MOM is improving data accessibility and facilitating data sharing. The software tools that are developed in this project are expected to be useful to the entire climate research community.