Final Technical Report Project Title: Adaptive Vertical Grid Enhancement for E3SM

Summary

This project, spanning from May 2018 to November 2023, aimed to enhance the representation of low-altitude clouds in global climate models by developing and implementing the Framework for Improvement by Vertical Enhancement (FIVE) into the Energy Exascale Earth System Model (E3SM). The approach demonstrated that E3SM-FIVE significantly improved marine stratocumulus representation, especially with a 25-km horizontal mesh, reducing biases in three regions. Initial tests showed that 15-m vertical resolution near cloud tops substantially improved cloud representation, while 7.5-m resolution was prohibitively expensive. The project also included the development of a 2D Hadley circulation model, enabling 1000-day simulations to study phenomena like the double ITCZ and aerosol-cloud interactions using resolutions down to 30-m vertically and 240-m horizontally. A proposed regionalized version of FIVE was found to require retrofitting over 15,000 lines of code, exceeding project scope. The work produced 6 journal articles and 36 presentations/seminars.

Key Facts

Source Document

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