Agenda and Lecture Schedule

Agenda:

Please find the agenda in pdf format here /site_media/docs/DCMIP-2012-agenda.pdf (or view the Attachment at the very bottom of the page).

In short, the bus will pick us up at the Golden Buff Lodge each morning at 8am. The morning lectures will start at 8:30am every day. We have scheduled two to three 50-minute (+10-minute discussion) tutorial-like lectures each day, and will also hear from two modeling mentors every morning (short overview talks of about 20 minutes, if you are a mentor we will contact you soon to confirm with you that you would like to do this). One mid-morning coffee/tea break is planned. The morning sessions conclude at about 12:30pm every day.

We meet for lunch in the NCAR cafeteria from 12:30-1:30pm. At approx. 1:30pm the hands-on afternoon sessions with the modeling mentors will start in various meeting rooms. We plan a coffee/tea break around 3:15pm each afternoon and continue the hands-on sessions until about 5pm each day. The bus back to the Golden Buff will leave the Foothills Lab around 5:15pm.

The last day (8/10/2012) will be devoted to student presentations and discussions (mornings and afternoons), and we conclude the summer school with a BBQ dinner on the Mesa Lab Tree Plaza.

Lecture schedule: http://earthsystemcog.org/projects/dcmip-2012/lectures

General overview of the lectures: Science Themes

Theme 0: Hands-On Computing and Overview of DCMIP (first day)

• Organizers: Welcome Note, Overview of DCMIP, Logistics
• CISL support group: Use of the NCAR supercomputers, batch queues
• Sylvia Murphy: Cyberinfrastructure for atmospheric modeling, Earth System Grid (ESG), Live Access Server (LAS), Metadata, demonstrations of cyberinfrastructure tools, introduction to the DCMIP workspace

Theme 1: Overview of Dynamical Cores and Trends in Dynamical Core Modeling

• Dave Randall: Overview of a GCM:
  building blocks dynamics and physics, dry equation sets for dynamical cores: review of the primitive equations, and how to extend them to non-hydrostatic equations, deep and shallow atmosphere approaches, spherical geopotential approximation versus elliptical shapes of the Earth, choices of the prognostic variables
• Mark Taylor: Review of typical grid resolutions (horizontal + vertical) in GCMs, challenges at high horizontal resolutions, emerging variable-resolution approaches for climate models with regional focus areas, illustrated with examples from the Spectral Element (SE) Community Atmosphere Model (CAM), design aspects of CAM-SE

Theme 2: Numerical Methods in Dynamical Cores

• Paul Ullrich: Review of spatial (horizontal) discretizations
• Michael Toy: Review of vertical discretizations and vertical coordinates
• Paul Ullrich: Review of time stepping schemes, numerical stability

Theme 3: Connecting the Dynamical Core and Physical Parameterizations

• Dave Randall: How to include moisture, moist equation sets, what are the moisture feedbacks, how do they drive the dynamics?
• Dave Williamson: How to couple dynamics and physics: grids, physics time steps and update intervals, process-split versus time-split, intrinsic time-scale dependencies in the physics, what are the sensitivities, sensitivities to resolutions?
• Rich Neale: Which types of physical parameterizations are present in weather and climate models? What are their high-level design philosophies?
• Dave Randall: What becomes obsolete in non-hydrostatic models and at which scale? What are the pros and cons of superparameterizations? How to think about scale-aware physical parameterizations suitable for models with variable-resolution grids?
• Judith Berner: principles of stochastic physical parameterizations, what is their promise?

Theme 4: Tracers in Atmospheric Models and their importance for climate models

• Peter Lauritzen: Tracer transport, design philosophies of advection schemes
• Ram Nair: Numerical methods for tracer advection

Theme 5: Evaluating dynamical cores and General Circulation Models (GCMs), Uncertainty & Ensembles

• Christiane Jablonowski: Structural and parameter uncertainty in dynamical cores, how do we test dynamical cores and full-physics weather and climate models: Overview of the test hierarchy including the Atmospheric Model Intercomparison Project (AMIP) and Aqua-Planet Experiments
• David Stainforth: Chaos and nonlinearity, basic issues of how we relate models of nonlinear systems to reality
• David Stainforth: Sources and types of uncertainty, design issues for different types of ensembles (Perturbed-Parameter-Ensembles (PPEs), Multi-Model-Ensembles (MMEs), and Initial-Condition-Ensembles (ICEs)), pros and cons of ensembles, physical and mathematical principles behind uncertainty characterization and quantification
• David Stainforth: Ensembles and questions of model exclusion, model weighting and model interpretation more generally, insights from the climateprediction.net experiments, personal perspective: towards seamless predictions across many scales, unified modeling
• Ricky Rood: Model validation and verification
• Jerry Meehl: Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Overview of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP5)
• Kevin Trenberth: Overview and characteristics of re-analysis data sets and their pros and cons for model evaluations

Theme 6: Emerging computational aspects and challenges for GCMs

• Rich Loft: Some basics on parallel computing (keywords), some history about parallel computing at NCAR and upcoming trends in parallel and high-performance computing, the challenges of massively parallel computing (hardware and software), scalability of GCMs, how to maximize and think about performance
• Jim Hack: High-performance computing needs for the climate and weather modeling community from the scientific and hardware perspectives, how feasible is the co-design of models and hardware, the interplay between the computational design and performance of atmospheric models (grids, domain decompositions, parallel communication, load balancing), how should/will future GCMs need to be designed
• Matthew Norman: some basics on General Purpose Graphical Processing Units (GPGPUs), pros and cons (and personal perspectives) of GPGPUs for atmospheric models, experiences and recommendations from a practitioner’s viewpoint

Theme 7: Diversity in Dynamical Cores participating in DCMIP

• All modeling mentors: Design philosophies of dynamical cores with specific examples from the models that participate in the workshop, shorter 20-minute presentations that explain the scientific reasoning/motivation behind the design choices

Theme 8: Tuning of dynamical cores and physical parameterizations

• Christiane Jablonowski: Filtering and diffusion in the dynamical cores, what are resolvable and unresolved scales?
• Jim Hack: What are the multitudes of empirical physics tuning parameters in GCMs (examples) and how are the valid ranges determined in practice? Principles of tuning (who does it, what are the physical principles behind it (e.g. energy balances?)), tuning for high resolutions, experiences with ultra-high resolution global coupled climate modeling and why tuning alone is not the answer, do we need to re-think how physical parameterizations work?

Theme 9 (last day): Dynamical Core Model Intercomparison, what did we learn?

• Group presentations: Results of the Model Intercomparison Project (15 minutes each)
• Skype sessions with remote participants, possibly remote presentations
• Perspective of the Modeling Mentors: Results of the Model Intercomparison Project
• Interactive ‘Question & Answer’ session with experts (modeling mentors, organizers, NCAR scientists), Review of the workshop