Our preliminary work on this project has been funded, in part, by
the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory Investment Fund (LIF).
For our first test cases and more details, see the CAMEL DataCatalog Page
The basic idea of this project is to create a simple tool to
couple atmosphere, land, ocean and seaice models.
The first job of the coupler, CAMEL, is to
interpolate the surface fluxes (as computed in the atmosphere model)
to land, ocean and seaice models and interpolate and patch the surface
temperature (as computed in the land, ocean and seaice models)
to the atmosphere model. The models can be
kept as separate executables when desired and the communication is then
done by reading/writing netCDF files. The interpolations and
scheduling is all done by CAMEL, with the separate models waiting
for updated information as needed. If any of the components are
already coupled into one model, as in
CCM3(atmosphere) and LSM (land)
, then CAMEL does not interfere, but does the coupling only
between separate models. Since
LOAM (ocean)
contains a dynamic and
thermodynamic seaice model, the simplest scenario is represented in
the following diagram:
In fact, CAMEL can be used much more generally to patch together the
surface conditions of multiple models. Depending on the science
question, a simple mixed layer LOAM ocean might be sufficient in the extra
tropics, with a multilevel, variable resolution only in the tropical
belt as in the following example:
Click to view
In addition, in any geographic area, climatological surface
conditions may be combined with model output. For instance, observed
SST data from 1948 to the present can be specified in the tropical
pacific while SST outside of that region is allowed to respond to the
atmosphere.
