Global and Regional Atmospheric Modeling Using Spectral Elements

To meet some of the outstanding issues associated with climate modeling such as exploiting new methodology for computation, utilizing the latest computing hardware, increasing the speed of computations and incorporating various space scales into one comprehensive model, we have developed a new global climate model entitled a Spectral Element Atmospheric Model, (SEAM), which can perform regional integrations concurrently with the global scale in a very straightforward manner. The model offers a number of distinct advantages over other global/regional models and is highly flexible. It utilizes the geometric properties of finite element methods, it allows for very convenient local mesh refinement and regional detail, it is ideally suited to parallel processing by minimizing communication amongst the processors, it is very efficient computationally, and last but not least, it has no pole problems. A number of tests with this model are described which will demonstrate the efficacy of the model’s advantageous features.