Introduction
The website publicizes information related to a collaboration project between University of Delaware and National Center for Atmospheric Research. Our goal is to apply the state-of-the-art computing tools to understand cloud microphysics and its impact on cloud dynamics.
Clouds play an essential role in the weather, the hydrological cycle, and the earth's climate system. Cloud microphysics, which includes the processes by which condensation particles form, grow, and transform, is a source of tremendous uncertainty in numerical atmospheric models because of the wide range of spatial and temporal scales involved and because of the nonlinear and multi-scale couplings among cloud microphysics, latent heating, small-scale turbulence dynamics, and larger scales of motion affected by density stratification and the Earth's rotation.
Specifically, we plan to develop and perform a hybrid direct numerical simulation (DNS) of cloud microphysics in a computational domain of the order of one cubic meter and large-eddy simulation (LES) at grid spacing of the order of one meter. These unprecedented resolutions for LES and DNS remove the current scale gap between DNS and LES, allowing us to develop accurate subgrid-scale models for LES based on DNS. Several open issues will be investigated from first principles, including effects of entrainment and mixing on droplet size distribution, effects of turbulent fluctuations on droplet growth by diffusion and collision-coalescence, and precipitation formation.
To achieve these objectives, we will also investigate computational and code implementation issues to enable simulations on future heterogeneous parallel computers, including algorithm selection and optimization issues, portability, scalability, fault tolerance, and scalable interactive visualization. We hope to achieve a petaflop speed (10 to the 15th power floating point operations per second) for our research codes.
For more information, please read the following articles:
NSF awards UD-NCAR group a petascale computing grant to study turbulent clouds.
UD workshop explores multiscale computing of cloud physics.
