Simulation of Global Cloudiness

Principal Investigator: David Randall
Affiliation: Colorado State University
Co-Investigators: Ross Heikes, Colorado State University; John Helly, San Diego Supercomputer Center; Bruce Palmer, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory; Karen Schuchardt, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory

Understanding the role of clouds in the global atmosphere is key to development of more accurate climate models. This project will numerically simulate global circulation of the atmosphere on a grid with roughly a 2 km grid spacing. This entails very large computations (e.g., a sustained Teraflop for 10 wall-clock days) and very large model output files (e.g., several petabytes). The models are based on the solution of partial differential equations on a geodesic grid. The impact of this research will be improved understanding of the role of clouds in the global atmosphere, and an improved capability for both weather prediction and the simulation of climate change.