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Seminar | Environmental Science

From Climate-Scale to Convective-Scale: Unified Weather and Climate Modeling at GFDL

EVS Seminar

Abstract: GFDL has developed a suite of numerical models for the full climate system, covering timescales from minutes to millennia unified around a common framework and common components. All models include atmospheres built around the GFDL Finite-Volume Cubed-Sphere Dynamical Core, FV3. FV3 uses a flexible and adaptable cubed-sphere grid and switchable nonhydrostatic dynamics, and can serve as the foundation for both efficient climate simulation and high-resolution weather prediction, and can also be used for cloud-resolving simulations through its regional and global variable-resolution capabilities.

We focus on weather and subseasonal prediction applications using the GFDL System for High-resolution prediction on Earth-to-Local Domains (SHiELD). We also discuss the value of a unified system as advances in one model configuration can be seamlessly adapted by other models in the GFDL modeling suite or other  FV3-based models. We close with a brief discussion of the NOAA Unified Forecast System of which the GFDL models are a part.

Bio: Lucas Harris is the Deputy Division Leader of the Weather and Climate Dynamics Division and the head of the FV3 Team at NOAA’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory. He holds a PhD in Atmospheric Sciences and an MS in Applied Mathematics, both from the University of Washington, and had previously been an undergraduate intern in the Environmental Research Division at Argonne National Laboratory.