Project: Hyperparameterization Framework for Mesoscale Oceanic Turbulence
Supervisors: Dr Igor Shevchenko (NOC) and Prof. Pavel Berloff
Project Description:
This project offers a unique opportunity to work at the interface of idealized ocean models mainly used for development of new methods and process studies, and comprehensive ocean models used in the leading weather forecast institutions (MetOffice, ECMWF, etc.), for providing operational weather forecasts and future climate predictions. The Project assumes going all the way from original ideas, to their conceptual verification and tests in conceptual and low-dimensional dynamical systems, to the ultimate implementation in realistic ocean models.
The Research Program will be gradually unfolding from relatively simple low-resolution models allowing for fast testing and calibration of new HP methods, going through high-resolution realistic models for perfecting the methods, to its final destination – applying the methods within the context of ultra-high-resolution configurations intended for the use on exascale-class computers of the future. The whole Program is tailored with one goal in mind: advancing high-resolution ocean forecast and the use of large ensembles with elevated prediction skills and extended forecast horizons.
The ocean general circulation is the most computationally intensive part of any comprehensive ocean-atmosphere forecasting system and, therefore, its most limiting factor. This is because the model needs to resolve mesoscale eddies, which induce crucial effects on the large-scale circulation. The situation is aggravated by the need to produce ensembles of solutions for the probabilistic ensemble forecast, but the capabilities are severely limited by computational resources. Ocean ensemble forecasts in eddy-resolving regimes are far beyond what supercomputers will be able to compute over the next decades, and here comes in the HP approach which allows to achieve this goal within only a few years. The Project is of high-impact nature for the following reasons:
(i) striking novelty in contrast with the mainstream parameterisation approaches that focus on small-scale physics,
(ii) ambitious scale of research program that goes from development of the methodology applied in conceptual models to working with the most comprehensive oceanic data sets and models.
