ICON-Sapphire: simulating the components of the Earth system and their interactions at kilometer and subkilometer scales

Cathy Hohenegger , Peter Korn , Leonidas Linardakis , René Redler , Reiner Schnur , Panagiotis Adamidis , Jiawei Bao , Swantje Bastin , Milad Behravesh , Martin Bergemann , Joachim Biercamp , Hendryk Bockelmann , Renate Brokopf , Nils Brüggemann , Lucas Casaroli , Fatemeh Chegini , George Datseris , Monika Esch , Geet George , Marco Giorgetta , Oliver Gutjahr , Helmuth Haak , Moritz Hanke , Tatiana Ilyina , Thomas Jahns , Johann Jungclaus , Marcel Kern , Daniel Klocke , Lukas Kluft , Tobias Kölling , Luis Kornblueh , Sergey Kosukhin , Clarissa Kroll , Junhong Lee , Thorsten Mauritsen , Carolin Mehlmann , Theresa Mieslinger , Ann Kristin Naumann , Laura Paccini , Angel Peinado , Divya Sri Praturi , Dian Putrasahan , Sebastian Rast , Thomas Riddick , Niklas Roeber , Hauke Schmidt , Uwe Schulzweida , Florian Schütte , Hans Segura , Radomyra Shevchenko , Vikram Singh , Mia Specht , Claudia Christine Stephan , Jin-Song von Storch , Raphaela Vogel (1) , Christian Wengel , Marius Winkler , Florian Ziemen , Jochem Marotzke , Bjorn Stevens

1 LMD - Laboratoire de Météorologie Dynamique (UMR 8539)

State-of-the-art Earth system models typically employ grid spacings of O(100 km), which is too coarse to explicitly resolve main drivers of the flow of energy and matter across the Earth system. In this paper, we present the new ICON-Sapphire model configuration, which targets a representation of the components of the Earth system and their interactions with a grid spacing of 10 km and finer. Through the use of selected simulation examples, we demonstrate that ICON-Sapphire can (i) be run coupled globally on seasonal timescales with a grid spacing of 5 km, on monthly timescales with a grid spacing of 2.5 km, and on daily timescales with a grid spacing of 1.25 km; (ii) resolve large eddies in the atmosphere using hectometer grid spacings on limited-area domains in atmosphere-only simulations; (iii) resolve submesoscale ocean eddies by using a global uniform grid of 1.25 km or a telescoping grid with the finest grid spacing at 530 m, the latter coupled to a uniform atmosphere; and (iv) simulate biogeochemistry in an ocean-only simulation integrated for 4 years at 10 km. Comparison of basic features of the climate system to observations reveals no obvious pitfalls, even though some observed aspects remain difficult to capture. The throughput of the coupled 5 km global simulation is 126 simulated days per day employing 21 % of the latest machine of the German Climate Computing Center. Extrapolating from these results, multi-decadal global simulations including interactive carbon are now possible, and short global simulations resolving large eddies in the atmosphere and submesoscale eddies in the ocean are within reach.

Domaines: Planète et Univers [physics]

Cathy Hohenegger, Peter Korn, Leonidas Linardakis, René Redler, Reiner Schnur, et al.. ICON-Sapphire: simulating the components of the Earth system and their interactions at kilometer and subkilometer scales. Geoscientific Model Development, 2023, 16, pp.779-811. ⟨10.5194/gmd-16-779-2023⟩. ⟨insu-03993954⟩