THE USE OF SPHERICAL GEODESIC GRIDS IN CLIMATE MODELING
Ross Heikes
Colorado State University
Abstract:
The idea of the geodesic grid was first introduced in the late 1960s
and after a period of dormancy is currently enjoying a significant
revival
within several modeling efforts including the Colorado State University
general circulation model. This type of grid eliminates the pole problem
and provides approximately homogeneous and isotropic resolution over the
sphere.
We have implemented an atmospheric general circulation model based on
the discretization
of an icosahedron. We will discuss issues dealing with the
parallelization of the model
across distributed memory computer architectures, and discretization of
the continuous
prognostic equations. Some numerical results will be presented.