THE USE OF SPHERICAL GEODESIC GRIDS IN CLIMATE MODELING

Ross Heikes

Colorado State University

Abstract:
The idea of the geodesic grid was first introduced in the late 1960s and after a period of dormancy is currently enjoying a significant revival within several modeling efforts including the Colorado State University general circulation model. This type of grid eliminates the pole problem and provides approximately homogeneous and isotropic resolution over the sphere. We have implemented an atmospheric general circulation model based on the discretization of an icosahedron. We will discuss issues dealing with the parallelization of the model across distributed memory computer architectures, and discretization of the continuous prognostic equations. Some numerical results will be presented.