Analyzing tropical cyclone-climate interactions using the Community Earth System Model (CESM)

Ryan Sriver, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Usage Details

We request 1,000,000 Blue Waters node hours to explore the role of tropical cyclones within Earth's changing climate system, using the Community Earth System Model (CESM). This project builds on a recent start-up Blue Waters allocation, in which we analyzed the scalability of CESM to ultra-high resolutions for studying cyclone-climate connections. Here we propose a suite of new simulations consisting of atmosphere-only and fully-coupled configurations of ultra-high resolution versions of CESM, in order to analyze TC-induced climate feedbacks and test the sensitivity of the climate response to ocean grid resolution. The modeling tasks will be performed by co-PI Li, who is fully-funded for the duration of the project and under the supervision of PI Sriver. As clearly demonstrated below, the anticipated expense of the proposed simulations is considerably outside the capabilities of traditional XSEDE resources, and it is for this reason we are requesting use of Blue Waters to pursue this investigation. The proposed runs will provide the critical next step in settling the decade-long debate about the importance of tropical cyclone-induced feedbacks for Earth's climate.