Parallel processing in regional climatology: The parallel version of the "Karlsruhe Atmospheric Mesoscale Model" (KAMM)

Simultaneously to improvements of computer performance and of availability of memory not only the resolution of meteorological models of atmospheric c urrents has been refined but also the accuracy of the necessary physical ap proximations has been improved more and more. Now full elastic models are d eveloped which describe also sound waves, although sound processes are not supposed to be relevant for atmospheric flow phenomena. But the full set of the elastic Navier-Stokes equations has a quite simple structure in compar ison to sound proved systems like "anelastically" approximated models, so t hat the corresponding numerical models can be implemented on parallel compu ter systems without too much efforts. This has been considered by the redes ign of the "Karlsruhe Atmospheric Mesoscale Model" (KAMM) for parallel proc essing. The new full elastic version of this model is written in FORTRAN-90 . The necessary communication operations are gathered into few functions of a communication library, which is designed for different computer architec tures, for massive parallel systems, for parallel vector computers requirin g long vectors, but also for mono processors. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science B.V . All rights reserved.