Convection-Resolving Modeling

The focus of this activity is to better understand and represent small-scale processes and physical feedbacks that are relevant for weather and climate in Central Europe and the Alpine region in particular. Real-case and idealized high-resolution simulations at a horizontal resolution O(100 m-10 km) are conducted that include an explicit (rather than parameterized) treatment of moist convection and a better representation of the topography and the underlying surface. The research addresses climate-scale simulations (up to 10 years) as well as case and process studies. Results demonstrate improvements over lower-resolution simulations, for example, in terms of the diurnal cycle of precipitation or the frequency-intensity distributions for hourly precipitation (Hohenegger et al., 2008, Ban et al., 2014). In the next years, we intend to further extend this convection-resolving climate modeling capability making use of a GPU-enabled version of the COSMO model. See also the crCLIM project.