At a recent National Supercomputer Centre in Guangzhou (NSCC-GZ) 2016 Users Group Annual meeting, high-resolution atmospheric general circulation model (GCMs) FAMIL (Finite volume Atmospheric Model of IAP/LASG) R&D Team won “2016 TIANHE Star Awards for Excellence Application”. The competition in December 2016 was organized by NSCC-GZ within its more than 1600 R&D Teams, among which only 20 teams were singled out. These awarded teams come from various industries and fields ranging from engineering simulation, aerospace, atmospheric and marine science, environmental science, building information modeling, new materials and new green energy, biological information and biomedicine, digital media and smart city etc. FAMIL R&D Team is the only group specializing in high-resolution climate modeling.

Climate system modeling is an essential tool for short-term climate prediction and climate change projection. It serves as a most important reference for the key issues in the Intergovernmental Panel on climate change (IPCC) assessment report. FAMIL is a new generation high-resolution atmospheric general circulation model in LASG. It applies mathematical and physical methods to describe the atmospheric circulations, and carry out large-scale parallel computing based on the atmospheric dynamical equations. It is the first GCMs in the country that can reach 6 km resolution globally. Double Intertropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ) and Maddan-Julian Oscillation (MJO) are both long-standing problems perplexing international modeling researchers. By taking advantage of Tianhe-2 Supercomputing resources, the FAMIL and its coupled version of FGOALS-f improved resolution to 25 km globally and developed a new physics scheme of resolving cumulus and thus greatly reduce the Double ITCZ bias. The model accurately reproduced the main propagation characteristics of MJO. All this greatly promotes the development of the climate system modeling field. FAMIL and its coupled version mode are one of the 4 climate system models with the highest resolution that participate in the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 6 (CMIP6). The successful development high-resolution FAMIL model and its coupling version indicate China has leaped into the front ranks in the global high-resolution climate modelling field.  

Awarding ceremony

Schematic figure of global high-resolution atmospheric general circulation model FAMIL