Session

DescriptionThe predictive skill of weather and climate models has significantly improved over the past few decades, thanks to a huge increase in resolution facilitated by increased supercomputing capacity. A million-fold increase in computational power has allowed the resolution of operational global weather models to increase from 500 km to 10 km since 1980, for example. Further increases towards 1 km resolution would deliver significant improvements in the skill of weather and climate simulations. However, these simulations are still not viable for operational predictions due to the vast increase in computational cost. The computational speed of global kilometer-scale simulations on today’s supercomputers is below a practical level by at least two orders of magnitude. Furthermore, taking advantage of future exascale supercomputers with heterogeneous architectures will require a substantial rethink of traditional coding paradigms.
This two-part minisymposium will bring together researchers on global kilometer-scale atmosphere and ocean models from around the world. Speakers will discuss both the scientific and computational challenges of 1 km resolution. They will present the state-of-the-art of their respective simulation systems and their roadmaps for the future. The challenge of kilometer-scale global simulations can be met, but only by the synthesis of ideas across Earth-System science and supercomputing.