This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).
The Petascale Arctic-Atlantic-Antarctic Virtual Experiment (PAVE) will be a kilometer resolution, planetary scale ocean and sea ice simulation that will first be configured to span the Arctic Ocean, Atlantic Ocean, and Atlantic sector of the Southern Ocean, and by the end of the project period will generalize to a fully global simulation. Project implementation will be based on the Massachussetts Institute of Technology General Circulation Model (MITgcm), an ocean and sea-ice modeling system that contains non-hydrostatic and adjoint modeling capabilities that are applicable to kilometer scale and multi-year simulations. Scientific questions motivating the simulations are intended to inform sampling strategies for current and future ocean observing networks. This is a significant broader impact. The large volumes of model output will be managed and made available to researchers without petascale resources, using a novel replay capability that will be developed as part of this project.