92nd American Meteorological Society Annual Meeting (January 22-26, 2012)

Thursday, 26 January 2012
Design and Development of a Unified Model on Icosahedral-Hexagonal Grids
Hall E (New Orleans Convention Center )
Om P. Sharma, Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, New Delhi, India; and H. Upadhyaya, P. Subbarao, and T. Singh
Manuscript (1.6 MB)

Poster PDF (1.2 MB)

There are continued attempts towards unifying the general circulation and cloud-resolving models. For designing high-resolution general circulation models, it is necessary to formulate a set of equations for the nonhydrostatic system such that when the the nonhydrostatic pressure is neglected, the system of equations reduce to a quasi-hydrostatic compressible model. Following the Konor and Arakawa (2009) approach, the governing equations of a unified model on icosahedral-hexagonal grid are formulated in the hybrid vertical coordinate. Further to this formulation, the flow dependent variables are represented in the basic equations into two parts - grid-resolved and a subgrid part - to formulated a system of equations that is capable of simulating the variability of unresolved processes. The advantage of splitting is obvious because the system of equations for grid-resolved variables are indeed those of a quasi-hydrostatic compressible model of the atmosphere. The discrete formulations of divergence, vorticity and gradient are then used to solve the shallow water model on the icosahedral-hexagonal grid as an example of the first stage development of a comprehensive unified model.

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