Icosahedral Shallow Water Model (ICOSWM): results of shallow water test cases and sensitivity to model parameters

P Rípodas,L Bonaventura,P Korn,G Zängl,H Wan,L Kornblueh,J Förstner,D Majewski,A Gassmann,M Giorgetta,T Heinze

doi:10.5194/gmd-2-231-2009

Abstract

Abstract. The Icosahedral Shallow Water Model (ICOSWM) has been a first step in the development of the ICON (acronym for ICOsahedral Nonhydrostatic) models. ICON is a joint project of the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg (MPI-M) and Deutscher Wetterdienst (DWD) for the development of new unified general circulation models for climate modeling and numerical weather forecasting on global or regional domains. A short description of ICOSWM is given. Standard test cases are used to test the performance of ICOSWM. The National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) Spectral Transform Shallow Water Model (STSWM) has been used as reference for test cases without an analytical solution. The sensitivity of the model results to different model parameters is studied. The kinetic energy spectra are calculated and compared to the STSWM spectra. A comparison to the shallow water version of the current operational model GME at DWD is presented. The results presented in this paper use the ICOSWM version at the end of 2008 and are a benchmark for the new options implemented in the development of the ICON project.

Highlights

ICON is a joint project of the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology (MPIM) and Deutscher Wetterdienst (DWD), the national weather service of Germany, for the development of new general circulation models
The ICON project joins DWD and Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg (MPI-M) resources to face these problems in the development of new models
For test cases 5 and 6 the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) Spectral Transform Shallow Water Model (STSWM) is used as reference

Summary

Introduction

ICON (acronym for ICOsahedral Nonhydrostatic) is a joint project of the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology (MPIM) and Deutscher Wetterdienst (DWD), the national weather service of Germany, for the development of new general circulation models. The project aims at unified general circulation models for climate modeling and numerical weather forecasting on global or regional domains. Various research institutes in Germany and elsewhere are contributing to the project, among which are University of Postdam, Free University of Berlin and Los Alamos National Laboratory. Bonaventura (2004) discussed the current problems in NWP and climate modeling like mass conservation and monotonicity of tracer concentrations, local mesh refinement and the use of massively parallel computers for high resolution modeling. The ICON project joins DWD and MPI-M resources to face these problems in the development of new models

Methods

Results

Conclusion