Developments undertaken within the NMMB multiscale model at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center

Oriol Jorba Casellas
Barcelona Supercomputing Center

Abstract:

The Earth Sciences Department of the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) and the National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NOAA/NCEP/EMC) have agreed to collaborate on the context of the development of the NMMB model and its applications to air quality and weather forecasting within the framework of a Memorandum of Understanding. BSC is implementing on-line gas-aerosol chemical modules within NMMB in collaboration with several research institutions (NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, International Research Institute for climate and Society and University of California, Irvine, University of Murcia, Technical University of Catalonia).

In this contribution we will describe the status of development of the system and some evaluation results. A mineral dust module has been coupled within the NMMB to simulate the atmospheric life cycle of the eroded dust. In order to complement such development, the implementation of a fully on-line tropospheric gas-phase chemical mechanism within the system has been done. The chemical mechanism is based on the Carbon Bond CB05, the Photolysis rates are computed with the Fast-J scheme, on-line deposition schemes and biogenic emissions are considered, and stratospheric ozone is driven with a linear stratospheric scheme. Future efforts will be oriented to incorporate a multi-component aerosol module within the system with the aim to solve the life-cycle of relevant aerosols at global scale (dust, sea salt, sulphate, black carbon and organic carbon).

Additionally, several tasks are undertaken to port and benchmark the system under different computing platforms (ranging from workstations to large HPC facilities). The recent experience acquired porting the model to the Marenostrum and the CURIE supercomputers will be presented together with some benchmark and performance results.