New supercomputers allow convection-resolving climate simulations

Using a new version of the weather and climate model COSMO, capable of using novel supercomputers employing GPU accelerators, external page Leutwyler et al. (2017) performed a 10-year-long climate simulation at 2.2 km resolution on a domain covering continental Europe (1536x1536x60 grid points). The paper has been selected as a publication highlight by external page AGUs Earth & Space Science News.

Thunderstorms and rains showers (deep convection) are difficult to simulate in today’s climate models. The computational meshes employed today are usually too coarse (10-200 km) to catch the associated small-scale motions. Therefore, these models treat deep convection using physically-based semi-empirical parameterizations. In the current study the grid spacing is refined to the kilometer scale, which allows switching off these parameterizations and thus formulating the model much closer to physical first principles.