INCITE PI Warren Washington, with the National Center for Atmospheric Research, presented exciting research results at the 92nd annual meeting of the American Meteorological Society on January 23. Dr. Washington gave the keynote address at the 12th Presidential Forum—the theme of which was “Technology in Research and Operations—How We Got Here and Where We’re Going.” Dr. Washington’s talk included an animation of a recent groundbreaking simulation performed on the ALCF’s Blue Gene/P, Intrepid, with version 5 of the NSF/DOE Community Atmosphere Model (CAM5): a two-year simulation running at 1/8 degree global resolution, with full prognostic aerosols and monthly varying sea surface temperatures derived from observations.

The simulation was performed on 64K cores of Intrepid, running at 0.25 simulated-years-per-day and taking 25 million core-hours. This is the first simulation using both the CAM5 physics and the highly scalable spectral element dynamical core. The animation of Total Precipitable Water clearly shows hurricanes developing in the Atlantic and Pacific. “We are on the threshold of simulating the global high-resolution atmosphere circulation on decadal and century time scales and this animation demonstrates this new capability,” Dr. Washington said.