Our guest for the March 14th CLaSP Seminar Series will be Dr. Xi Chen of Princeton University.

Title: From the numerics to applications - a brief introduction to FV3 and beyond

Abstract: Simulating flows on the earth is hard. Various external forces, challenging geometry, the broad range of scales of motions make simulating the Earth flows extremely difficult. Although geophysical flows are only a subset of the broad CFD topics, traditional CFD approaches are far from adequate. CFD targets on generic, "one-size-fits-all" solutions, which might not be accurate or efficient in the geophysical environment. The Geo-CFD and CFD fields have a similar length of history, but there is scarce communication between these two. Therefore, many fundamentally solved topics in CFD are still highly debated in Geo-CFD community.

As a dynamical core, FV3 created many innovative numerical creations that respect the nature of the atmosphere but rarely follow the "traditional" thinking. After successfully powering many prominent GCMs for decades in the climate research, FV3 is replacing the US operational weather forecast this year. A unified modeling approach (UFS) is also being implemented in every aspect of NOAA's research applications (Chaired by Prof. Rood). This presentation will very briefly introduce the core algorithms of the FV3 and try to address some controversial numerical topics in the Geo-CFD community. The main focus of this work is to present research results varying from the largest climate scales to the smallest CRM/LES scales. I will also discuss the future pathways of the FV3 development from the developer's perspective. Most work in this presentation is accomplished by the FV3 team led by Dr. SJ Lin (a.k.a. the Weather Master).