[NARCCAP-discuss] why 50km x 50km

[Oleksandr Huziy]

Hello,

since nobody has answered this, I could try to suggest these reasons:
1. The resolution is limited by the computational cost, when you decrease
gridsize, you'll have to decrease the time step (this increases integration
times enormously, talking from experience, since we're not yet
parallelizing in time) and when you decrease the grid spacing the number of
points will increase, since you would still want to cover the same region
(North America). For example from 200x200 points domain with 50km spacing
you would get 1000x1000 with 10 km spacing and as far as I know these sizes
are not available for all institutions (even for the operational tasks (i.e
short periods) they have become available only recetly)... It'll take a lot
of time to run, and a lot of space to store...
2. The model parameterizations were developed for the rough resolutions and
not all the models can be easily changed to the higher resolution.
3. I would even say that the analysis of the 1000x1000 grid over 30 years,
with daily resolution is not an easy task...

Cheers

--
Oleksandr (Sasha) Huziy



2013/5/23 Jianhua Huang <jianhua.huangsdu at gmail.com>

> Dear all:
>
>
>
> Anyone knows why the NARCCAP models choose the 50km x 50km resolution? This
> looks a naïve question, but I was asked in a recent presentation. I checked
> the NARCCAP website thoroughly, but found no answer. Why the resolution is
> 50km x 50km, why not 10km x 10 km? Is 50 km resolution good enough to catch
> the spatial heterogeneity of climate change in the United States?
>
>
>
> Thanks for any clue or suggestion.
>
>
>
> Jianhua
>
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