Water Vapor: Hourly Model
Details
Permalink to Details- Added to the Catalog
- Available for
- SOS
- Categories
- Air: Weather
- Keywords
- Atmosphere
- CESM
- Climate
- Earth Observing System
- Water Vapor
- Weather
Description
Permalink to DescriptionThis animation shows Community Earth System Model (CESM) output depicting hourly time steps of water vapor (TMQ) across the globe for an entire year. The CESM is a fully coupled, global climate model that provides state-of-the-art computer simulations of the Earth's past, present, and future climate states. This ultra-high resolution global model shows developing weather patterns in rich detail, and helps researchers understand the effect of smaller, more localized weather on the dynamics of climate at the planetary scale.
The current generation of coupled general circulation models (CGCMs) is designed to be able to perform century and multi-century simulations. With existing computing power availability, this has restricted models to have grid spacings of around 1° (~100km). These models adequately resolve large scale climate characteristics but do not capture smaller scale features such as tropical cyclones, which have important local impacts and may feedback to the large scale climate.
In this ultra-high resolution experiment, the Community Earth System Model was used for a 60 year simulation under "present-day (year 2000)" greenhouse gas conditions with much finer grid spacings of 10km to 25km. This is made possible in part thanks to the NCAR-Wyoming Supercomputing Center.
The research was enabled by the National Center for Atmospheric Research's (NCAR) Computational and Information Systems Laboratory (CISL) compute and storage resources, including Yellowstone, the petascale computer in the NCAR-Wyoming Supercomputing Center (NWSC), which opened in October 2012 in Cheyenne, Wyoming.
This project was funded by Department of Energy (DOE) office of Biological and Environmental Research. Computing time was supported by DOE and National Science Foundation through its support of NCAR and the NCAR-Wyoming Supercomputing Center.
Notable Features
Permalink to Notable Features- Bright rotating features represent water vapor associated with tropical storms, hurricanes, and typhoons.
- Water vapor circulation patterns evolve with the seasons. For example, water vapor over India changes dramatically with the onset and dissipation of the seasonal monsoon.
Data Source
Permalink to Data SourceClimate Science: Justin Small, Julio Bacmeister, David Bailey, Frank Bryan, Julie Caron, David Lawrence, Bob Tomas, Joe Tribbia (All NCAR) Computation: Allison Baker, John Dennis, Jim Edwards, Andy Mai, Mariana Vertenstein (All NCAR)