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Dynamics research

The Dynamics Research team develops and maintains the dynamical core of the Met Office's Unified Model and undertakes research on numerical techniques for use in future cores.

Key aims

Our key aims are to maintain, improve and develop current, and new, dynamical cores for the Met Office Unified Model.

The dynamical core and the Unified Model

The dynamical core of the Unified Model predicts that part of the evolution of the winds and thermodynamic properties of the atmosphere due to fluid dynamical processes which are resolved by the model's grid and time step.

ENDGame

ENDGame is the current operational dynamical core for the Unified Model and is based on a semi-implicit semi-Lagrangian discretization of the governing equations. ENDGame is a finite-difference model discretized on a latitude-longitude grid and is based on the fully compressible, nonhydrostatic Euler equations. However, an important aspect of ENDGame is that it is designed around an iterative approach to solving the semi-implicit aspects of the scheme. This permits more accurate coupling of the scheme to the physics parametrizations. It also produces a simpler form of the Helmholtz problem that arises from the semi-implicit discretization.

Designing future cores

To be able to run effectively on the next generation of supercomputers, future atmospheric dynamical cores will need to scale on hundreds of thousands of processors. The challenge is to achieve the required scalability while retaining the accuracy of the current dynamical core. Designing such a core, therefore, requires a mix of numerical analysis, geophysical fluid dynamics and computational science. To bring this expertise together, the Met Office, NERC and STFC implemented a five-year program (2011-2016), to research, design and develop a new dynamical core.

 

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