Planet simulator

From OceanWiki_EN

Planet simulator - is a Model of Intermediate Complexity (MIC) which can be used to run climate and paleo-climate simulations for time scales up to 10 thousand years or more in an acceptable real time. The priorities in development are set to speed, easy handling and portability. Its modular structure allows a problem dependent configuration. Adaptions exist for the atmospheres of Mars and of Saturn’s moon Titan. Common coupling interfaces enable the addition of ocean models, ice models, vegetation and more. An interactive mode with a Model Starter (MoSt) and a Graphical User Interface (GUI) can be used to select a model configuration from the available hierarchy, set its parameters and inspect atmospheric fields while changing model parameters on the fly. This is especially useful for teaching, debugging and tuning of parameterizations. This paper gives an overview of the model’s features.

The PlanetSimulator consists of a GCM with, for example, a linear ocean/sea-ice module formulated in terms of a mixed layer energy balance. The soil/biosphere module is introduced analoguously. Thus, working the PlanetSimulator is like testing the performance of an atmospheric or oceanic GCM interacting with various linear processes, which parameterise the variability of the subsystems in terms of their energy (and mass) balances.

Coding the PlanetSimulator requires that it is portable to many platforms ranging from personal computers over workstations to mainframes; massive parallel computers and clusters of networked machines are also supported. The system is scalable with regard to vertical and horizontal resolutions, provides experiment dependent model configurations, and it has a transparent and rich documented code.

The complete model including sources and documentation is available at www.mi.uni-hamburg.de/plasim