Assist. Prof. Nikolina Ban, PhD
University of Innsbruck (UIBK), Department of Atmospheric and Cryospheric Sciences
e-mail: Nikolina.Ban@uibk.ac.at
webpage: https://www.uibk.ac.at/acinn/people/nikolina-ban.html.en
Title of the invited lecture: Mountain climate at the kilometer-scale grid spacing
Mountains play a major role in shaping the weather and climate of the world. However, the current understanding of mountain climate and how it will change with further warming of the atmosphere is still very limited. The uncertainty is in large part related to the coarse grid spacing of current climate models (12-50 kilometers in regional and >50 kilometers in global climate models), which are not able to properly represent the complex mountainous orography and related processes. Thus, employing climate models with a kilometer-scale grid spacing provides a promising path.
In this work, we use the COSMO (COnsortium for Small-Scale MOdelling) climate model (COSMO-CLM) that is capable of using Graphics Processing Units (GPUs), thus providing a significant performance increase in comparison to its standard version, which runs on CPUs. The model is run on Piz Daint (Cray XC50 with Nvidia Tesla P100 GPUs) system at the Swiss National Supercomputing Center, thanks to the computing resources awarded through the PRACE project.
In this presentation, I will present simulations performed with a horizontal grid spacing of 2.2 km over the region of Europe (focus on European Alps) and High Mountain Asia (HMA). The simulated domains, with 1542×1542 and 2640×1475 grid points for Europe and HMA, respectively, are unprecedented in their size and resolution for climate simulations of these regions in general and COSMO-CLM applications in particular. The focus of the presentation will be on the model performance and evaluation in present-day climate, as well as future climate simulations of extreme events like heavy precipitation.
Short CV:
Nikolina Ban is currently an assistant professor at the Department of Atmospheric and Cryospheric Sciences at the University of Innsbruck (UIBK) in Austria. She received her PhD in High-Resolution Climate Modeling from ETH Zürich (Switzerland) in 2014 and her Diploma in Physics from the University of Zagreb (Croatia) in 2010. After completing her PhD, she continued to work as PostDoc and Senior Scientist at ETH Zürich. Since 2019, she is an assistant professor at the UIBK working on regional high-resolution climate modeling with a focus on mountain climate and extreme events, like heavy precipitation, and their changes with further warming of the atmosphere. Since 2020, she is co-leading international projects like the Numerical modeling group of CORDEX FPS on Third Pole and TEAMx Working group on Mountain Climate.