Events

 
Colloquium

Towards Convection-Resolving Climate Modeling

Tuesday, 09 February 2016, 16:45-18:15
KIT, CS, IMK-TRO, Geb. 30.23, 13.OG, Seminarraum 13-02
Moist convection is a fundamental process in our climate system, but is usually parameterized in climate models. The underlying approximations introduce significant uncertainties and biases, and there is thus a general thrust towards the explicit representation of convection. For climate applications, convection-resolving simulations are still very expensive, but are increasingly becoming feasible. Here we present recent results pertaining to the development and exploitation of convection-resolving regional climate models. We highlight validation using decade-long simulations, explore convection-resolving climate change scenarios, and provide an outlook on the use of next-generation supercomputing architectures. Decade-long simulations will be presented using the COSMO model over two computational domains at a horizontal resolution of 2.2 km. The first domain covers an extended Alpine region from Northern Italy to Northern Germany (500x500x60 grid points). The second domain covers most of Europe (1536x1536x60 grid points) and the respective simulations exploit heterogeneous many-core hardware architectures with GPUs. Results show that explicit convection enables realistic meso-scale structures, leads to significant improvements in the representation of summer precipitation, and also to substantial differences in climate change projections of precipitation. This presentation uses material of several collaborators (among these Nikolina Ban and David Leutwyler) and of project crCLIM (http://www.c2sm.ethz.ch/research/crCLIM.html).
This event is part of the eventgroup Meteorology Colloquium Karlsruhe
Speaker
Prof. Ch. Schär, ETH Zürich

Institute for Atmospheric and Climate Science, Zurich, Switzerland
Organizer
IMK-TRO
Institute of Meteorology and Climate Research
KIT
Wolfgang-Gaede-Str. 1
76131 Karlsruhe
Tel: 0721 608 43356
Mail: imk-tro does-not-exist.kit edu
https://www.imk-tro.kit.edu
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