"Real-time visualization of a high-resolution global ocean and sea ice
simulation"

Authors: Dimitris Menemenlis, Chris Hill, Chris Henzebr
Speaker: Dr. Heidi Lorenz-Wirzba, JPL

To increase understanding and predictive capability of the ocean's
role in future climate change scenarios, the NASA Modeling, Analysis,
and Prediction (MAP) program is funding a project called "Estimating
the Circulation and Climate of the Ocean, Phase II (ECCO2)":
High-Resolution Global-Ocean and Sea-Ice Data Synthesis. ECCO2 aims to
produce increasingly accurate syntheses of all available global-scale
ocean and sea-ice data at resolutions that start to resolve ocean
eddies and other narrow current systems, which transport heat, carbon,
and other properties within the ocean.  ECCO2 data syntheses are
obtained via the least-squares fit of an eddy-permitting global-ocean
and sea-ice configuration of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
general circulation model (MITgcm) to the available satellite and
in-situ data. These data syntheses are in turn used to quantify the
role of the oceans in the global carbon cycle, to understand the
recent evolution of the polar oceans, to monitor time-evolving term
balances within and between different components of Earth system, and
for many other science applications.

This presentation concerns real-time visualization of one of the ECCO2
high-resolution global-ocean and sea-ice model configurations, which
has horizontal grid spacing of 1/8 degree, and which is integrated on
up to 1920 processors of a cluster of distributed shared memory
machines at the NASA Ames Research Center.  Real-time visualization
permits efficient storage of a rich set of diagnostics from these
computations, supporting the scientific objective to develop a better
understanding of global ocean circulation and climate. The specific
visualization example concerns the ocean Planetary Boundary Layer
(PBL), which mediates all exchanges of heat, momentum, freshwater, and
biochemical tracers, e.g., carbon, between the atmosphere and the
ocean. The simulated ocean PBL has significant variability on a wide
range of temporal and spatial scales, from hours to years and from
tens of kilometers to basin scales.  Real-time visualization provides
a first look of the various interacting surface forcing conditions and
model prognostic variables, thus permitting to formulate hypotheses
regarding the various contributions to PBL depth.