Technical Developments

Technical Infrastructure Development Activities in SIMA

October 22, 2024

CAM simple physics component sets (compsets) have been successfully ported to CAM-SIMA. These include the moist baroclinic wave test, the dry Held and Suarez (1994) benchmark and the Thatcher and Jablonowski (2016) moist variant of Held-Suarez. 

A snapshot comparing the moisture field in moist Held-Suarez in the CAM and CAM-SIMA code bases is shown below. The simulations produce idealized, but Earth-like circulations of the atmosphere. In particular there is a pronounced ITCZ in the deep Tropics, and westerly jets that aid in the development of mid-latitude cyclones that transport moisture to higher latitudes. 

The solutions evolve differently in the two code bases because the porting to CAM-SIMA is not bit-for-bit with CAM due to changes in model infrastructure and code refactoring. The CAM-SIMA code refactor primarily consists of changes to the physics code for compliance with the more modular CCPP framework, requiring the removal of host model dependencies and code interdependencies within the physics suites.

TJ2016_compare

July 24, 2024

The SIMA Software Ecosystem consists of a number of separate code bases that are related to one another in a specific way. For example, the Community Earth System Model (CESM) is dependent on an atmosphere model (CAM-SIMA), and CAM-SIMA is dependent on the CCPP framework which builds the CCPP compliant physics suites. Below is a schematic showing the entire SIMA Software Ecosystem and their dependencies, where each box represents a separate code base that is housed and maintained in its own Github repository. Progress on the individual code bases will be summarized on this web page periodically, so please check back!

 

sima-gitflow-top

Github repositories:

  • ccpp-framework - CAPGEN CCPP framework

  • CAM-SIMA - NCAR host model

  • UFS - NOAA host model

  • Atmospheric_Physics - CCPP-compliant CAM physics

  • MUSICA - CCPP-compliant chemistry

  • ccpp-physics - CCPP-compliant UFS physics

  • WRF Physics - CCPP-compliant mesoscale physics suite

  • MPAS-A Dynamical Core - NCAR non-hydrostatic dycore for mesoscale applications

  • Standard Name Dictionary - Dictionary of CCPP standardized variable names