The 4th meeting of the HiGEM consortium reported on results from the initial phase of the project, which involves moving the new Hadley Centre Earth System model (HadGEM1) to the NERC high performance computing platform (HPCx).

Both atmosphere and ocean only versions of HadGEM1 are now running on HPCx. Currently the atmospheric model is being run at a resolution of 1.25 degrees of latitude x 1.875 degrees of longitude (N96) and has completed 5 years. The team working on the ocean model are running at a 1/3 of a degree resolution and have successfully run the model for a few days, but with issues still to resolve.

Another area of progress has been the generation of high resolution data files which the models need as input. Known as ancillary files they define things like which points are land and which sea, the vegetation types and the orography. The next stage is to use these in a model run, at which stage they may need further adjustment.

• Agreed strategy

The group agreed that the priority for the next phase of the project will be to run a coupled version of the Hadley Centre Earth System model at an atmospheric resolution of 0.833 degrees of latitude x 1.25 degrees of longitude (N144) and a 1/3 of a degree in the ocean.

There is also the option of mixing and matching various atmospheric and oceanic resolutions - this would help to answer fundamental questions about the benefits of increased resolution.

• Related projects

The Earth Simulator Project .
The Water, Life and Civilisation Project .
The CGAM contribution to the EU Ensembles Project.
The development of Adaptive Mesh Refinement (AMR) – a novel computational technique which allows high resolution to be applied to certain regions of interest in the ocean/atmosphere, while leaving other regions at lower resolution.