Clouds & Climate is a group within the Faculty of Applied Sciences at the Delft University of Technology. As a group, we perform fundamental research in the turbulent processes involved in cloud dynamics. The resulting knowledge may be applied to weather or climate models, improving their forecasts. We often employ (high-resolution) simulations to simulate the behavior of clouds in different climate conditions. At this moment, how clouds respond to climate change is one of the key uncertainties in climate modeling.
GALES: GPU-resident Atmospheric Large-Eddy Simulation
In order to study cloud procesesses in detail, often Large-Eddy Simulations (LES) are employed. These simulations model the finest turbulence scales, but explicitly resolve (aka calculate) the larger turbulence motions, allowing one to study the turbulent motions responsible for producing the low clouds which have so much impact on the daily weather. These simulations are computationally so heavy, however, that they're typically performed using supercomputers or clusters, using dozens of processors in p
arallel.
In combination with the Delft Computer Graphics Group, our FORTRAN90-based parallel Dutch Atmospheric LES (DALES) was rewritten in C++ and CUDA to be performed on the graphical processing unit (GPU). Using the large computational power ofmodern-day GPUs, simulations which otherwise would require dozens (32-64) processors can now be run on a desktop PC with equivalent speeds. Also, the GPU is able to directly render the three-dimensional dynamics of the atmosphere by 'volume rendering' the cloud field or show particle releases, 2D cross-sections and live statistics.