Climate modeling at the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology

ICON, which obtains its name from the usage of spherical grids derived from the icosahedron (ICO) and the non-hydrostatic (N) dynamics, originated as a joint project of the MPI-M and the German Weather Service (Deutscher Wetterdienst, DWD) and has expanded to involve more development partners at the German Climate Computing Center (DKRZ), the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich and the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT). It includes component models for the atmosphere, the ocean and the land, as well as chemical and biogeochemical cycles, all implemented on the basis of common data structures and sharing the same efficient technical infrastructure. It is integrated and maintained by a group of experts for model development and application in the institute’s Scientific Computing Laboratory.

By developing a global configuration of ICON that employs horizontal grids fine enough (< 5km) to resolve the vertical energy transport through deep convection in the tropics, eddies in the ocean and small-scale structures in topography, ocean bathymetry and sea-ice, a more physically-based model can be created. This configuration allows scientists at MPI-M to pose new types of questions, or provide better answers to old questions. Unfortunately, this configuration can only be used for experiments on sub-centennial time scales, as the time step is too small to allow longer integrations, hence the dual strategy and the continuation of more traditional approaches as discussed above.

Developing a simulation system that works at such high resolution introduces new technical challenges, for instance how to use new types of computational infrastructures, such as GPU-based machines, and how to redesign the workflow in order to make it possible to work with the large amount of data that is produced. This also brings new facets to our work which are also helping to reshape climate research.