Establishing a non-hydrostatic global atmospheric modeling system at 3-km horizontal resolution with aerosol feedbacks on the Sunway supercomputer of China

Sci Bull (Beijing). 2022 Jun 15;67(11):1170-1181. doi: 10.1016/j.scib.2022.03.009. Epub 2022 Mar 14.

Abstract

During the era of global warming and highly urbanized development, extreme and high impact weather as well as air pollution incidents influence everyday life and might even cause the incalculable loss of life and property. Despite the vast development of atmospheric models, there still exist substantial numerical forecast biases objectively. To accurately predict extreme weather, severe air pollution, and abrupt climate change, numerical atmospheric model requires not only to simulate meteorology and atmospheric compositions simultaneously involving many sophisticated physical and chemical processes but also at high spatiotemporal resolution. Global integrated atmospheric simulation at spatial resolutions of a few kilometers remains challenging due to its intensive computational and input/output (I/O) requirement. Through multi-dimension-parallelism structuring, aggressive and finer-grained optimizing, manual vectorizing, and parallelized I/O fragmenting, an integrated Atmospheric Model Across Scales (iAMAS) was established on the new Sunway supercomputer platform to significantly increase the computational efficiency and reduce the I/O cost. The global 3-km atmospheric simulation for meteorology with online integrated aerosol feedbacks with iAMAS was scaled to 39,000,000 processor cores and achieved the speed of 0.82 simulation day per hour (SDPH) with routine I/O, which enabled us to perform 5-day global weather forecast at 3-km horizontal resolution with online natural aerosol impacts. The results demonstrate the promising future that the increasing of spatial resolution to a few kilometers with online integrated aerosol feedbacks may significantly improve the global weather forecast.

Keywords: Convection-permitting resolution; Domestic supercomputer; Heterogeneous many-core architecture; Non-hydrostatic global model; Online integrated aerosol.

MeSH terms

  • Aerosols / analysis
  • Air Pollutants* / analysis
  • Air Pollution* / analysis
  • Feedback
  • Weather

Substances

  • Air Pollutants
  • Aerosols