The Atmospheric Physics Group led by Prof Ralf Toumi are developing a high resolution Earth system model that integrates the atmosphere, ocean, waves, land, biosphere and sea-ice data on a regional scale. This Regional Earth System Model (ReEMS) model is made up of well established (with a track record of international peer review) ocean and atmosphere model components which are integrated and set up for the region.  This advances our understanding of extreme events and the regional budgets of water, carbon and aerosol. It is suitable for regional climate change simulations and other sensitivity studies.

Modeling the Climate System

 

The model draws data from three global models:

  1. The Weather Research Forecasting Model which is the world’s most widely used atmospheric model and is an open source community tool, maintained by National Center for Atmospheric Research
  2. The Climate Forecasting System (CFS) to enable it to re-analyse and assimilate (“merge”) observations into a model to give the best estimate of the 6 hourly weather globally
  3. The Regional Ocean Modelling System which is a free-surface, terrain-following, primitive equations ocean model widely used by the scientific community for a diverse range of applications.

The core atmospheric module is WRF and the core ocean module is ROMS.

To date, Prof Toumi’s team have generated approximately 1PB of model output which has required the computing hardware, infrastructure and tools to enable these data to be analysed, exploited and archived.