The on-line coupled atmospheric chemistry model system MECO(n) – Part 5: Expanding the Multi-Model-Driver (MMD v2.0) for 2-way data exchange including data interpolation via GRID (v1.0)

This article is part of the model documentation of the MECO(n) system (MESSyfied ECHAM and COSMO models nested n-times). As part of the Modular Earth Submodel System (MESSy) the Multi-Model-Driver (MMD v1.0) was developed to couple on-line regional model instances into a driving model (see Part 2 of the model documentation). MMD comprises the message passing infrastructure required for the parallel execution (multiple program multiple data, MPMD) of different models and the communication of the individual model instances, i.e. between the driving and the driven models. Initially the MMD library was developed for a 1-way coupling between the global chemistry climate model EMAC and an arbitrary number of (optionally cascaded) instances of the regional chemistry climate model COSMO/MESSy. Thus MMD (v1.0) provided only functions for unidirectional data transfer, i.e., from the larger scale to the smaler scale models.

Soon, extended applications requiring data transfer from the small-scale model back to the larger scale model became of interest: e.g., the original fields in the larger scale model can directly be compared to the up-scaled small-scale fields to analyse the gain by the original small-scale calculations, if the results are up-scaled. ... mehrSecondly, the fields originating from the two different models might be fed into the same diagnostic tool, e.g. the on-line calculation of the radiative forcing calculated consistently with the same radiation scheme. Last but not least, enabling the 2-way data transfer between two models is the first important step on the way to a fully dynamically and chemically 2-way coupling of the various model instances.

In MMD (v1.0) interpolation between the basemodel grids is performed via the COSMO pre-processing tool INT2LM, which was implemented as MMD submodel for on-line interpolation, specificially for mapping onto the rotated COSMO grid. A more flexible algorithm is required for the backward mapping. Thus, MMD (v2.0) uses the new MESSy submodel GRID for the generalised definition of arbitrary grids and for the transformation of data between them.

In this article we explain the basics of the MMD expansion and the newly developed generic MESSy submodel GRID(v1.0) and show some examples of the applications mentioned above.