West African Monsoon, a computational model
Date
2023-09-20
Authors
Richers, Merrick
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Abstract
The West African summer Monsoon (WAM) is a weather phenomenon that is both unpredictable, and paramount to local water resources; with current climate models providing conflicting information pertaining to rainfall. The research conducted investigates the modification of a preexisting computational model of the Indian Monsoon for use in the WAM. This process required an understanding of the model’s C++ source code, code compilation, and command line Linux for HPC cluster usage; as well as learning the terminology of climate science, the basics of fluid mechanics, and the partial differential equations that govern the monsoon model. The main modifications that were done to the code were to change the latent and sensible heat forcing to that of the WAM using real world data. This required the writing of a netCDF data extractor, a csv file reader, a linear interpolator, and a way to alter the domain of the simulation. The resulting data has been plotted, and it has been concluded that the model requires some fine tuning to produce more accurate results, but is otherwise functional. The resulting code and data has been documented and shared with the research group, with plans to expand upon this project at a later date.
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Keywords
Climate model, monsoon, computer science, climate, atmosphere, West African Monsoon