An Intercomparison of 10 Atmospheric Model Dynamical Cores

The poster introduces an idealized test suite for the dynamical cores of Atmospheric General Circulation Models (GCMs) and presents results of the broadest dynamical core intercomparison project ever conducted to date. The intercomparison project was held at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), Boulder, in June 2008. It was part of the NCAR Advanced Study Program's Summer Colloquium that not only surveyed the latest developments in numerical methods for dynamical cores but also hosted 10 modeling groups, key lecturers and 40 students for a two-week time period. The participating models represent a wide spectrum of numerical approaches and computational grids like latitude-longitude grids, Gaussian, icosahedral and cubed-sphere meshes. The comparison reveals new insights into the characteristics of the model simulations which include the diffusion and conservation properties. These were assessed via six deterministic dynamical core test cases run by the student group. The test hierarchy is now suggested as the starting point for a standard dynamical core test suite and serves as a launch pad for an even broader community driven dynamical core intercomparison experiment.