Atmospheric Circulation Dynamics and General Circulation Models

After the release of the First Edition, many responses have returned to the author about this book. Many people kindly reported errors and corrections to me. One of the reasons for the release of the Second Edition was such an accumulation of errors found in the First Edition. Another reason was the new trend of atmospheric general circulation modeling which appeared almost at the same time as the release of the First Edition in 2004. A massive parallel vector supercomputer called ’’the Earth Simulator” (ES) was launched in 2002 at the Japan Agency for Marine- Earth Science and Technology (JAMSTEC), and the author became involved in a new modeling project toward efficient use of ES. Instead of the hydrostatic spectral general circulation model, we have developed a nonhydrostatic icosahedral-grid general circulation model, called NICAM, and ran very high resolution simulations with horizontal mesh spacing around 3.5 km at the highest covering the global domain quasi-uniformly. Chapters 24-26 are new and devoted to introducing the background and the detailed numerical techniques of NICAM, as one example ofglobal nonhydrostatic modeling. In recent years, many modeling groups in the world have become interested in and actually developed global nonhydrostatic models with various choices of numerical architectures. This textbook cannot cover all the aspects of the various numerical techniques, but concentrates only on giving an example of the existing model. This area has been very active in recent years, and new papers are constantly being published. Readers should regard Chapters 24-26 as a pioneering example of this new research area.Particular thanks are given to: Prof. Noriyuki Nishi and Dr. Atsushi Hamada, who gave feedbacks after carefully reading the book at the Climate Physics Lab­oratory at Kyoto University; Dr. Nagio Hirata, who organized an atmospheric modeling seminar at the Center for Climate System Research, the University of Tokyo; Prof. Hiroshi L. Tanaka, who also took part in a book-reading seminar at the University of Tsukuba, and Dr. Chihiro Kodama at JAMSTEC. The figure on the cover page was produced by the Earth Simulator Center of JAMSTEC using a land image provided by NASA.