Development of the Finite-Volume Dynamical Core on the Cubed-Sphere

The finite-volume dynamical core has been developed for quasi-uniform cubed-sphere grids within a flexible modeling framework for direct implementation as a modular component within the global modeling efforts at NASA, GFDL-NOAA, NCAR, DOE and other interested institutions. The shallow water equations serve as a dynamical framework for testing the implementation and the variety of quasi-orthogonal cubed-sphere grids ranging from conformal mappings to those numerically generated via elliptic solvers. The cubed-sphere finite-volume dynamical core has been parallelized with a 2-dimensional X-Y domain decomposition to achieve optimal scalability to 100,000s of processors on today's high-end computing platforms at horizontal resolutions of 0.25-degrees and finer. The cubed-sphere fvcore is designed to serve as a framework for hydrostatic and non-hydrostatic global simulations at climate (4- to 1-deg) and weather (25- to 5-km) resolutions, pushing the scale of global atmospheric modeling from the climate/synoptic scale to the meso- and cloud-resolving scale.