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Abstract

A global, high-resolution, and parallel coupled atmosphere-ocean general circulation model (CGCM) has been developed under a joint project between University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) and Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL). This project is funded by the Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics (IGPP) at LANL, with Dr. Jin-Yi Yu (UCLA) and Dr. Robert C. Malone (LANL) as PIs.

The CGCM consists of the latest version of the UCLA atmospheric GCM (AGCM) and the newest version of LANL Parallel Ocean Program (POP) oceanic GCM (OGCM). The AGCM covers the global atmosphere and the OGCM covers the global ocean between 70N and 70S. Both models include advanced parameterizations of the major physical processes in the atmosphere and ocean and have been parallellized for high computational performance. CGCM integrations are performed on a 1-Teraflop peak speed SGI Origin 2000 system at LANL. The schematic diagram shown here outlines the major components of the UCLA-POP CGCM.

The UCLA-POP CGCM is developed to be used for climate simulations that require high resolution, long integrations, and global coverage. One area of climate research that can make best use of this high-performance CGCM is the understanding and simulation of the climate variability of global oceans. Ocean climate variability are often related to interactions with the atmosphere and interactions among different ocean basins, and usually evolve at very long timescales. To better understand the causes of ocean climate variability requires a coupled model whose atmospheric and oceanic components have high resolution both in the Tropics and extratropics, and which is able to perform very long-term integrations in a reasonable wall-clock time.

Acknowledgment
The new UCLA-POP CGCM is developed with the support from Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics (IGPP) at Los Alamos National Laboratory.

Selected Publications