Managing Director:
     Masahide Kimoto
     (University of Tokyo)

  Summary
 Applications of global atmosphere and climate computations range over wide temporal scales: from daily weather and long-range forecasts to global warming projections. Since longer target range requires massive amount of computations, the present-day models do not make explicit computation of individual clouds even for tomorrow’s weather. Instead, the effects of clouds as a whole are only semi-empirically incorporated in order to finish the computation before the day breaks. This research project tries to foresee what can be accomplished when such computational constraint is relaxed in the near future. Typhoons consist of enormous number of cumulonimbus clouds and how will they change under the influence of global warming? Would the success of predictions for slowly migrating super cloud clusters on the equator bring revolution for tropical weather forecasts? Not only spatial resolution, but incorporation of more detailed processes such as material cycles with bio-geochemical reactions may open the possibility of predicting future concentration of carbon dioxide or air pollution? With the help of computational power of the K-Computer, we seek for new possibility of global climate simulation.

Videos provide : Athena Project(NICS/NSF/NOAA/NASA/COLA/ECMWF/University of Tokyo/JAMSTEC/Cray Inc.)
Precipitation distribution map from long-period simulation using NICAM
( Grid interval = 7km; initial value = May 21, 2009)