Towards Operational Weather Prediction at 3.0km Global Resolution With the Dynamical Core NUMA

Even with today's supercomputers it is still impossible to explicitly represent all scales involved in weather prediction. A large number of different numerical methods have been developed to improve the efficiency of numerical simulations. Among those methods are the element-based Galerkin methods which allow arbitrary high order for the spatial discretization and promise excellent scalability on large supercomputers.

The authors are developing the dynamical core NUMA which is used within the next-generation weather prediction model NEPTUNE of the US Navy. NUMA incorporates many recent developments like spectral element and discontinuous Galerkin methods. The authors have optimized NUMA for the supercomputer Mira of the Argonne National Lab. NUMA achieves an excellent strong scaling efficiency of 99% which allows to run a one day forecast of a baroclinic instability test case at 3.0km global horizontal resolution within the time frame required for operational weather prediction.

In addition to global climate and weather simulations NUMA is also capable of running Large Eddy cloud simulations using subgrid scale parameterizations like the model by Smagorinsky. Special emphasis has been given to the photo-realistic visualization of the model results by using the Maya computer graphics software. The authors offer instructions at http://anmr.de/cloudwithmaya that allow scientists to import their cloud simulation data into Maya and visualize it in a photo-realistic way.