The credibility of regional climate simulations over West Africa stands and falls with the ability to reproduce the West African monsoon (WAM) whose precipitation plays a pivotal role for people’s livelihood. In this study, we simulate the WAM for the wet year 1999 with a 27-member multi-physics ensemble of the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model. We investigate the inter-member differences in a process-based manner in order to extract generalizable information on the behavior of the tested cumulus (CU), microphysics (MP), and planetary boundary layer (PBL) schemes. Precipitation, temperature and atmospheric dynamics are analyzed in comparison to the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) rainfall estimates, the Global Precipitation Climatology Centre (GPCC) gridded gauge-analysis, the Global Historical Climatology Network (GHCN) gridded temperature product and the forcing data (ERA-Interim) to explore interdependencies of processes leading to a certain WAM regime. We find that MP and PBL schemes contribute most to the ensemble spread (147 mm month⁻¹) for monsoon precipitation over the study region. Furthermore, PBL schemes have a strong influence on the movement of the WAM rainband because of their impact on the cloud fraction, that ranges from 8 to 20 % at 600 hPa during August. More low- and mid-level clouds result in less incoming radiation and a weaker monsoon. Ultimately, we identify the differing intensities of the moist Hadley-type meridional circulation that connects the monsoon winds to the Tropical Easterly Jet as the main source for inter-member differences. The ensemble spread of Sahel precipitation and associated dynamics for August 1999 is comparable to the observed inter-annual spread (1979–2010) between dry and wet years, emphasizing the strong potential impact of regional processes and the need for a careful selection of model parameterizations.

We calculate the chemical evolution of protoplanetary disks considering radial viscous accretion, vertical turbulent mixing, and vertical disk winds. We study the effects on the disk chemical structure when different models for the formation of molecular hydrogen on dust grains are adopted. Our gas-phase chemistry is extracted from the UMIST Database for Astrochemistry (Rate06) to which we have added detailed gas-grain interactions. We use our chemical model results to generate synthetic near- and mid-infrared local thermodynamic equilibrium line emission spectra and compare these with recent Spitzer observations. Our results show that if H₂ formation on warm grains is taken into consideration, the H₂O and OH abundances in the disk surface increase significantly. We find that the radial accretion flow strongly influences the molecular abundances, with those in the cold midplane layers particularly affected. On the other hand, we show that diffusive turbulent mixing affects the disk chemistry in the warm molecular layers, influencing the line emission from the disk and subsequently improving agreement with observations. We find that NH₃, CH₃OH, C₂H₂, and sulfur-containing species are greatly enhanced by the inclusion of turbulent mixing. We demonstrate that disk winds potentially affect the disk chemistry and the resulting molecular line emission in a manner similar to that found when mixing is included.

The Model for Prediction Across Scales (MPAS) is a novel set of Earth system simulation components and consists of an atmospheric model, an ocean model and a land-ice model. Its distinct features are the use of unstructured Voronoi meshes and C-grid discretisation to address shortcomings of global models on regular grids and the use of limited area models nested in a forcing data set, with respect to parallel scalability, numerical accuracy and physical consistency. This concept allows one to include the feedback of regional land use information on weather and climate at local and global scales in a consistent way, which is impossible to achieve with traditional limited area modelling approaches. Here, we present an in-depth evaluation of MPAS with regards to technical aspects of performing model runs and scalability for three medium-size meshes on four different high-performance computing (HPC) sites with different architectures and compilers. We uncover model limitations and identify new aspects for the model optimisation that are introduced by the use of unstructured Voronoi meshes. We further demonstrate the model performance of MPAS in terms of its capability to reproduce the dynamics of the West African monsoon (WAM) and its associated precipitation in a pilot study. Constrained by available computational resources, we compare 11-month runs for two meshes with observations and a reference simulation from the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model. We show that MPAS can reproduce the atmospheric dynamics on global and local scales in this experiment, but identify a precipitation excess for the West African region. Finally, we conduct extreme scaling tests on a global 3 km mesh with more than 65 million horizontal grid cells on up to half a million cores. We discuss necessary modifications of the model code to improve its parallel performance in general and specific to the HPC environment. We confirm good scaling (70 % parallel efficiency or better) of the MPAS model and provide numbers on the computational requirements for experiments with the 3 km mesh. In doing so, we show that global, convection-resolving atmospheric simulations with MPAS are within reach of current and next generations of high-end computing facilities.

The Common Community Physics Package (CCPP) is a collection of physical atmospheric parameterizations for use in Earth system models and a framework that couples the physics to a host model's dynamical core. A primary goal for this effort is to facilitate research and development of physical parameterizations and experimentation with physics–dynamics coupling methods while simultaneously offering capabilities for use in numerical weather prediction (NWP) operations. The CCPP Framework supports configurations ranging from process studies to operational NWP as it enables host models to assemble the parameterizations in flexible suites. Framework capabilities include variability in scheme call order; ability to group parameterizations for calls in different parts of the host model, allowing intervening computation or coupling to additional components; options to call some parameterizations more often than others; and automatic variable transformations. The CCPP Framework was developed by the Developmental Testbed Center and is distributed with a single-column model that can be used to test innovations and to conduct hierarchical studies in which physics and dynamics are decoupled. It is also an integral part of the Unified Forecast System, a community-based, coupled, comprehensive Earth modeling system designed to support research and be the source system for the NOAA's operational NWP applications. Finally, the CCPP Framework is under various stages of adoption by a number of other models in the wider community.

Supercritical accretion flows inevitably produce radiation-pressure driven outflows, which Compton up-scatter soft photons from the underlying accretion flow, thereby making hard emission. We performed two-dimensional radiation hydrodynamic simulations of supercritical accretion flows and outflows, while incorporating such Compton scattering effects, and demonstrated that there appears a new hard spectral state at higher photon luminosities than that of the slim-disk state. In this state, as the photon luminosity increases, the photon index decreases and the fraction of the hard emission increases. The Compton $$y$$-parameter is on the order of unity (and thus the photon index will be $$\sim$$2) when the apparent photon luminosity is $${\sim}$$ 30$$L_{\rm E}$$ (with $$L_{\rm E}$$ being the Eddington luminosity) for nearly face-on sources. This explains the observed spectral hardening of the ULX NGC 1313 X-2 in its brightening phase, and thus supports the model of supercritical accretion onto stellar-mass black holes in this ULX.

Regional weather forecasting models like the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model allow for nested domains to save computational effort and provide detailed results for mesoscale weather phenomena. The sudden resolution change by nesting may cause artefacts in the model results. On the contrary, the novel global Model for Prediction Across Scales (MPAS) runs on Voronoi meshes that allow for smooth resolution transition towards the desired high resolution in the region of interest. This minimises the resolution-related artefacts, while still saving computational effort. We evaluate the MPAS model over Europe focussing on three mesoscale weather events: a synoptic gale over the North Sea, a föhn effect in Switzerland, and a case of organised convection with hail over the Netherlands. We use four different MPAS meshes (60 km global refined to-3 km (60– 3 km), analogous 30–3 km, 15–3 km, global 3 km) and compare their results to routine observations and a WRF setup with a single domain of 3 km grid spacing. We also discuss the computational requirements for the different MPAS meshes and the operational WRF setup. In general, the MPAS 3 km and WRF model results correspond to the observations. However, a global model at 3 km resolution as a replacement for WRF is not feasible for operational use. More importantly, all variable-resolution meshes employed in this study show comparable skills in short-term forecasting within the high-resolution area at considerably lower computational costs.