9525786 Semazzi and Scroggs Under their last award, the principal investigators developed a non-hydrostatic, semi-implicit, semi-Lagrangian global atmospheric model. The two main objectives that will be pursued under this award are: (1) to incorporate bottom topography in their non-hydrostatic model and test the model performance in the presence of topography at resolutions at which the hydrostatic approximation is valid and (2) to study the sensitivity of the model solutions to resolution and to quantify the non-hydrostatic effects at regional and global scales using a high resolution version of the model. Because simulation of non-hydrostatic circulations can be realized only at very high resolution requiring access to extremely large amounts of computer memory, carrying out the latter task will require the development of a version of the model based on parallel processing. As global atmospheric models move to ever higher resolutions in order to effectively capture the interactions of local circulations and the synoptic and planetary scale flows, it will be imperative to be able to adequately represent non-hydrostatic effects. This research project will contribute significantly towards that goal.
