HR: 12:05h
AN: A22B-10 INVITED    [Abstracts]
TI: Flexible climate modeling systems: Lessons from Snowball Earth, Titan and Mars
AU: * Pierrehumbert, R T
EM: rtp1@geosci.uchicago.edu
AF: The University of Chicago, Dept. of the Geophysical Sciences 5734 S. Ellis Ave, Chicago, IL 60637, United States
AB: Climate models are only useful to the extent that real understanding can be extracted from them. Most leading- edge problems in climate change, paleoclimate and planetary climate require a high degree of flexibility in terms of incorporating model physics -- for example in allowing methane or CO2 to be a condensible substance instead of water vapor. This puts a premium on model design that allows easy modification, and on physical parameterizations that are close to fundamentals with as little empirical ad-hoc formulation as possible. I will provide examples from two approaches to this problem we have been using at the University of Chicago. The first is the FOAM general circulation model, which is a clean single-executable Fortran-77/c code supported by auxiliary applications in Python and Java. The second is a new approach based on using Python as a shell for assembling building blocks in compiled-code into full models. Applications to Snowball Earth, Titan and Mars, as well as pedagogical uses, will be discussed. One painful lesson we have learned is that Fortran-95 is a major impediment to portability and cross-language interoperability; in this light the trend toward Fortran-95 in major modelling groups is seen as a significant step backwards. In this talk, I will focus on modeling projects employing a full representation of atmospheric fluid dynamics, rather than "intermediate complexity" models in which the associated transports are parameterized.
DE: 3344 Paleoclimatology (0473, 4900)
DE: 3346 Planetary meteorology (5445, 5739)
SC: Atmospheric Sciences [A]
MN: 2007 Fall Meeting