How close are we to global km-scale weather and climate simulations?
A recent study investigates how close we are towards achieving global km-scale weather and climate simulations. A baseline of what is achievable today is established using a fully refactored model code on Europe’s largest supercomputer Piz Daint at the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre CSCS in Lugano.
The best hope for reducing long-standing global weather and climate model biases is by increasing resolution to the kilometer scale. But how far are we away from achieving such simulations? A external pagerecent collaborative study of a team of MeteoSwiss, ETH and C2SM researchers, led by Dr. Oliver Fuhrer, has addressed this question by performing simulations using the non-hydrostatic regional climate model COSMO 5.0 for a near-global setup running on the full Piz Daint supercomputer on 4’888 GPUs (graphics processing units). The model code has been refactored for performance portability across different hardware architectures. Results at a grid spacing of 1.9 km indicate a baseline of what is already achievable today on Europe’s largest supercomputer.