FOAM: Expanding the Horizons of Climate Modeling

We report here on a project that expands the applicability of dynamic climate modeling to very long time scales. The Fast Ocean Atmosphere Model (FOAM) is a coupled ocean- atmosphere model that incorporates physics of interest in understanding decade to century time scale variability. It addresses the high computational cost of this endeavor with a combination of improved ocean model formulation, low atmosphere resolution, and efficient coupling. It also uses message-passing parallel processing techniques, allowing for the use of cost-effective distributed memory platforms. The resulting model runs over 6000 times faster than real time with good fidelity and has yielded significant results.